NIH grant to help U. of Missouri study how young students can perform better in math

A four-year $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help researchers at the University of Missouri create a Learning Disabilities Innovation Hub.

The team will also use the money to examine how both classrooms and in-home environments can impact a child's long-term struggles with understanding math, according to a news release.

“The in-home assessments will measure parents’ knowledge of math and reading skills, so we’ll have an idea of the knowledge that the parents bring into their interactions with their kids in the home,” said David Geary, the University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science, in the release. 

“In addition we’ll record the kids and parents interacting during a birthday party both years because that type of interaction tends to produce number talk," he added. "Then we’ll analyze the videos to see how those interactions are influencing a child’s development during their two years of preschool.”

The project is designed to help researchers better understand why some children struggle with math, while others thrive. The Learning Disabilities Innovation Hub builds on an earlier six-year project led by Geary. That project found a link between a child's knowledge of numbers early on and school readiness when it comes to math, the press release noted. 

Geary's team identified the critical skills needed to understand the subject and discovered that children who did not develop these skills in preschool were starting one grade level by the beginning of first grade. This new project aims to understand why this variation in learning occurs.

Researchers will test preschoolers' math skills and cognitive abilities seven times over two years of preschool, the release said. The team will observe the children's classroom behavior and will also receive four reports from teachers about how the children pay attention while at school. 

Three in-home assessments for each preschooler over the two-year period will be included in the project. The goal is to determine the influence of parents or guardians on a child's ability to learn math. Geary and his team want 150 children and their families from the Title 1 preschool program from Columbia Public Schools to participate in the study. 

According to the release, Geary's team hopes to identify the core predictors of knowledge, acquisition, and progression, which will help them develop targeted interventions.