Susan Mayer Publications

Language skill gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged children emerge well before formal schooling, in part due to disparities in parent–child shared reading practices. This paper reports results from an 11-month randomized controlled trial. The study evaluates the impact of providing low-income families with an electronic tablet loaded with a digital library on the language skills of children aged three to five. The digital library included over 200 children’s books and, for a randomly assigned subset of families, incorporated behaviorally informed goal-setting and reminder messages. All tablet functions other than the reading application were disabled. Access to the digital library alone led to a significant improvement of 0.29 standard deviations in children’s language skills relative to families who did not receive it. We find no statistically significant evidence that behavioral messages improve outcomes beyond access to the digital library on average. Subgroup analysis suggests that the benefits of digital library access are concentrated among children with lower baseline language skills: children below the median improved by approximately 0.6 standard deviations, significantly more than their higher-skilled peers, closing about 15 percent of the baseline language gap. Overall, these findings demonstrate that educational technology designed for home use can meaningfully support early language development and may help reduce disparities in children’s learning outcomes.

Parental engagement with schools is an important part of child development. Yet, parent engagement with preschools tends to be low. To increase parental attendance at school-sponsored family engagement events, we conducted a 4-month RCT with 319 parents across six preschools in Chicago. We designed an intervention using a combination of financial incentives and two tools from behavioural economics: loss-framing and reminder messages. The treatment parents were given a $25 per event incentive to attend 8 events sponsored by their preschools, as well as weekly text message reminders about the events. The financial incentive was framed using loss aversion: parents were initially given $200 in a virtual account and lost $25 for each missed event. We find no extensive margin treatment effect: the intervention did not increase the fraction of parents who attended at least one event. However, there is a statistically significant 32% (7% points) intensive margin treatment effect. We also found that treated parents were also more likely to attend unincentivized events after the intervention.

Math skill in early childhood is a key predictor of future academic achievement. Parental engagement in math learning contributes to the growth of children's math skills during this period. To help boost parent-child engagement in math activities and children's math skills, we conducted an RCT lasting 12 weeks with 758 low-income preschoolers (3-5 years old) and their primary caregivers. Parents were randomized into five groups: 1) a control group, and groups that received 2) a digital tablet with math apps for children; 3) analog math materials for parents to use with children, 4) analog math materials with weekly text messages to manage parents' present bias; and 5) analog math materials with weekly text messages to increase parents' growth mindset. Relative to the control group, neither the analog math materials alone nor the analog materials with growth mindset messages increased child math skills during the intervention period. However, the analog math materials combined with messaging to manage present bias and the digital tablet with math apps increased child math skills by about 0.20 standard deviations (p=.10) measured six months after the intervention. These two treatments also significantly increased parents' self-reported time engaged in math activities with their children.