Math Partners: Collaborations to Support Early Math Learning

Young children thrive when strong relationships exist between their home and school environments. Often, schools and teachers struggle to establish these strong relationships. Math Partners will work with teachers and teaching assistants in classroom design teams to help teachers establish healthy, positive relationships with families that center families’ knowledge and experiences.

Early home and school experiences support the development of mathematical skills. Therefore, Math Partners will focus on helping teachers and families build strong partnerships in the context of mathematics. Math Partners will use teacher professional development (i.e., learning labs and small-group coaching) and classroom design teams to help teachers enhance their classroom teaching by centering families’ perspectives and practices in the classroom and helping families have joyful experiences with mathematics at home.

The Math Partners intervention is informed by the concepts of Funds of Knowledge and Community Cultural Wealth that inform our growing understanding of how to help teachers partner with families to support early math learning. This project will establish more equitable, dual-capacity partnerships that recognize and honor families' knowledge and perspectives.

We will examine if and how teachers’ and families’ beliefs about family engagement and family math capacity shift as a result of this intervention and how the intervention impacts families’ math engagement at home. Teachers will receive Practice-Based Coaching in small groups with other teachers and will form design teams in each Math Partners classroom.

The design teams will inform how the teachers provide math activities, materials, and instruction. The design teams will help develop math-centered family engagement practices through home visits, classroom “stay-and-plays,” and home activities. We will use quantitative and qualitative methods to assess program effectiveness and impact, including surveys, analysis of recorded meetings and activities, service logs, and focus groups and interviews with families and teachers.

Math Partners includes four phases: (1) an initial design phase conducted in collaboration with four early childhood classrooms (PreK-2), (2) a field test conducted in collaboration with six early childhood classrooms, (3) a pilot randomized controlled design with 15 treatment and 15 control classrooms, and (3) a dissemination phase. Dissemination will include traditional outlets (research publications and conference presentations), as well as webinars and tip sheets for practitioner and family audiences.

The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models, and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.