DAYTON, Ohio — For many parents, making sure their child is prepared to start kindergarten is usually a high priority.
A big part of being ready includes some basics like math.
Mary Wagner is an associate psychology professor at the University of Dayton.
It’s summer break and her 4-year-old neighbor Khloe likes to come over to play.
“Very good! Okay, last one!” said Wagner as they finished up a game at her dining room table.
Believe it or not, Khloe is learning math.
“It does not look like worksheets. It does not look like flashcards,” said Wagner.
They’re playing games like Hungry Numbers, Tiny Polka Dot, and a special interactive book that was created in Wagner’s lab with her students.
“My students and I spend a lot of time at preschools,” she said.
Recently Wagner received more than $700,000 in grant funding from the National Science Foundation to help children ages 3 to 5 prep for math concepts.
“One of the barriers to a lot of research in this area is that researchers tend to require children to have to come to a university setting to do the research which really limits who can actually come to the university,” she said.
It’s a five-year research grant and Wagner is teaming up with another associate professor from Indiana University.
The full grant totals more than $2 million and funds three studies to better understand how preschoolers learn math concepts.
Wagner and her team go into schools in her local community.
“We want to really understand children’s development in our community across socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, gender lines,” she said.
Wagner said one key to learning math early is to understand the difference between numbers and size.
“What we have learned from our research is that this is really challenging for young children because they often think that if there are objects that are bigger, that must mean there are more of them, and that’s not always the case,” she said.
The goal is to make sure all materials can be easily integrated into preschool classrooms and shared with the teachers.
“We make sure that we are developing these materials with several things in mind, that the materials are freely available, that they are accessible to all families, that they could be easily implemented into an early childhood classroom,” she said.
Wagner’s lab also supports undergrad research and internship opportunities for up to 20 UD students each year.
“To get the opportunity to really do a project that is relevant for our local community, for my community that I live in, it’s an exciting opportunity for me that I’m really grateful to have,” she said.
This National Science Foundation grant builds on Wagner’s past research back in 2020, which included a National Institutes of Health grant.
That study examined the development of mathematics in young children coming from under-resourced backgrounds.