ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

Ninth-grade biology students create cell models using clay.

Home > ECR Projects Search > Project Detail
STEM Learning and Learning Environments STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Improving children's ability to connect counting to cardinality through shared book reading

Effective Years: 2017-2021

Individual differences in children's early math understanding are driven, in part, by differences in children's early learning environments. However, it is unclear exactly how early learning environments should be structured to support the development of children's math understanding. Lack of such knowledge is a critical problem because, without it, scientists cannot explain and predict children's understanding of foundational math concepts, and parents and educators are left to rely on their own, sometimes erroneous intuitions when choosing learning materials for their children. In the current project, researchers from the University of Notre Dame will study how the design of one type of early learning material - children's counting books - affects children's book reading behaviors and early math understanding. In this way, the project will further the mission of EHR Core Research (ECR) program to advance knowledge of children's math learning and the early learning environments that support it.

The central hypothesis is that counting books with tactile features (e.g., pop ups, textured graphics) will be less effective than those without tactile features for supporting children's understanding of counting and associated math concepts. Books with tactile features are expected to elicit at least two behaviors that may hinder math learning: (a) attention focused on the individual objects rather than on the set as a whole and (b) off-task utterances and actions. The research team will work with a diverse sample of preschoolers from Head Start, Title-I preschools, and private early childhood programs. The research methods include a pretest-intervention-posttest randomized experiment in which children will read assigned books with a trained tutor in school over the course of several weeks, as well as a less structured experiment in which children will read assigned books with their primary caregiver in a more naturalistic shared book reading context. By combining these approaches, the researchers will not only be able to determine how different types of books affect pre-to-post changes in math understanding, but also be able to conduct detailed observations and analyses of the language and behaviors that emerge during shared book reading. The project will advance the science of early math learning by testing theory-driven hypotheses. Findings will inform best-practice guidelines for the design of counting books and, thus, will help parents and early childhood educators make more informed decisions when selecting learning materials for their homes and classrooms.