Can Bedtime Learning Change Kids' Attitudes Toward Math?

For the past year and a half, Drs. Sian Beilock and Susan Levine have been collaborating on the Bedtime Learning Together (BLT) project, funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation. Graduate students Talia Berkowitz and Marjorie Schaeffer are working on the project along with Beilock and Levine. This project aims to evaluate whether parent-child interaction around fun and interesting math problems results in positive changes in children’s’ math learning and math attitudes compared to a reading control group.

During the Fall of 2013, over 600 families with children entering 1st grade signed up to participate in the study. Each family was given an iPad mini with the Bedtime Learning Together app preloaded on it. Parents were asked to read the nightly passages and work through the math or reading questions with their children at least 4 times a week throughout the school year. The project calls for following children throughout the first five years of elementary school. During year two of the project, an additional 270 families with children in pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten will be recruited to join the study as part of a second cohort.

This is not the first major collaboration between the Beilock and Levine labs. The two PIs also collaborate on a Department of Education (Institute for Education Sciences) study looking at the relationship between elementary school teachers’ math anxiety, parents’ math anxiety and student learning across the school year. This research is showing that parents, particularly those high in math anxiety, need support to effectively help their children with their math homework. In many ways the BLT project is an extension of this work, incorporating measures from parents in addition to teacher and student measures. The BLT project also works with younger students than included in the Institute for Education Sciences study to examine the possible emergence of math anxiety very early in schooling.

Prior research in Susan Levine’s lab has shown that early number talk is crucial for the development of later math skills. Prior work in Sian Beilock’s lab has documented the deleterious effects of math anxiety on performance. By combining their expertise, the researchers are currently focused on finding ways to help parents reduce their math anxiety and more effectively support their children’s math learning. The hope is that by providing a script for even the most math anxious parents to talk comfortably with their children about number and spatial concepts, children will show more positive math attitudes, more interest in math, and greater math learning.