Remote Parent Coaching in Preschool Mathematics: Evidence from Peru

The program’s objective is to accelerate learning of fundamental skills among preschoolers to ready them for subsequent education in mathematics. These foundational skills covered four areas of mathematical ability. First, counting and cardinality, where the child should be able to grasp that the last number in a sequence represents all the objects counted. Second, mathematical operations and algebraic thinking, including the ability to do basic operations with symbols and forms of expression, working with numbers 0 to 10. This includes addition using fingers, verbal explanations, or equations. Third, measurement, including the ability to contrast the size and length of different objects. Fourth, geometry, including the ability to recognize and understand the properties of two- and three-dimensional shapes, copy and draw symmetrical shapes, and understand spatial relations. MateWasi is an adapted version of an interactive radio instruction program from Paraguay (Näslund-Hadley et al., 2014) in which teacher and students were guided through hands-on, inquiry-based activities that included visualizations of mathematical shapes and relationships, mathematics storytelling, and singing and dancing. MateWasi is open and free to any household. Our research design therefore randomized remote access to coaches, who called parents and guided them through the program activities. In total, 14 instructors under the guidance of two field coordinators, made weekly phone calls to parents, coaching them to interact with their children. The 10-week coaching component was offered only to the treatment group in our study sample. In addition, parents in the treatment group received text messages and educational materials to which the coaches referred during the phone calls in order to stimulate math-related activities.

2021-01-14

2021-03-30

We estimate the impacts of the intervention on parental engagement in educational activities and children's numeracy skills and children's literacy skills.

Children's numeracy and literacy skills are collected using scores from a standardized remote assessment test on the phone and through a parent survey. Parental engagement is measured by an index constructed using parents' reports about the time spent with their children on educational activities and other productive routines and investments.

Parental wellbeing, parental perceptions of their role as caregivers, discipline practices at home and children's socio-emotional outcomes.

Parental wellbeing, perceptions and discipline practices are captured by parents' self-reported measures. Children's socio-emotional outcomes are collected through parents' reports on children's wellbeing and behaviors.

We randomly assigned access to remote coaching (phone calls, texts, and materials) in our sample. We have one control group (no remote coaching) and one treatment group (access to remote coaching).

MateWasi (without the coaching) was publicly available and, therefore, open to
members of the control group who chose, independently of our project, to take advantage of it.

Thus, the empirical analysis aims to estimate the causal effect of access to trained professionals who encouraged and guided parents throughout the MateWasi activities.

Randomization done in office by a computer program

We conduct an individual-level randomization assign half of the children and parents to either receive the intervention or not receive the intervention

No

None, randomization was done at the individual level

1068 children-parents

Treatment 532; control 533

Our calculations indicate that assuming a probability of error type I of 0.05, a power of 0.8, 533 parents and children in control and 532 in treatment group, the minimum detectable effect is 0.17 SD