Home Learning Boosts School Readiness

In a study focused on low-income families, researchers at the Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. determined that poor children tended to be more ready for school if they had gone through learning experiences at home with their parents.

In past studies, it was demonstrated that low-income children tended to be less preparative to go to school than their peers who were a lot better off. But the cause of this discrepancy has never been properly studied, until now.

Experts at Mathematica and the New York University say that the lower degree of preparedness may be due to the fact that poorer kids go through fewer learning experiences within their own families.

As such, attending school – with all the demands that come with it – is a shock, and the young ones tend to appear unprepared. On the other hand, those who are better off tend to be more accustomed to the way the learning process works.

This research indicates that low-income parents could significantly improve their kids' academic outlook if they would just take the time to put their children through at least a few learning experiences.

“Our findings indicate that enriched learning experiences as early as the first year of life are important to children's vocabulary growth, which in turn provides a foundation for children's later school success,” explains Mathematica expert and survey researcher Eileen T. Rodriguez.

She conducted the new study while a PhD student at the New York University. She is also the lead author of a paper detailing the findings, which appears in the latest issue of the scientific journal Child Development.

The work was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Science. “This research provides an important glimpse into how children learn and develop in naturalistic settings across time,” DBCS social psychologist and deputy director Amber Story says,

“Such data is difficult to gather but it adds a necessary dimension to our understanding of learning and all the factors that impact it before the child even reaches the classroom,” she goes on to say.

“The quality of children's environments over time varied greatly. Some children experienced environments that were uniformly low or high in language and literacy supports at all ages examined, while others experienced environments that changed as they developed,” Rodriguez concludes.