Geetha Ramani
University of Maryland, MD·Education Research
Children who start school with strong early math knowledge tend to do better in math later and are more likely to move forward in STEM fields. Yet children from lower-income households already lag behind their higher-income peers in math by preschool.
- Fields
Education Research
Psychology
- Topics
early math
early childhood education
math talk
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test whether three-month home-based trainings on math communication, with and without gestures, increase the math talk and gestures used by parents and their preschool-age children during play.
- Determine whether the math talk trainings improve preschoolers' early math skills, measured before training, right after it, and in a delayed test three months later.
- Examine whether the trainings work differently for families whose parents hold different mindsets, that is, beliefs about whether math skills can be improved.
More about the research
One promising place to close that gap is the home, where everyday play and conversation with adults can carry a lot of mathematical information. This collaborative project asks whether coaching parents to talk and gesture about math during daily routines can boost young children's math skills.
Why it matters
Because the math gap between lower- and higher-income children appears as early as preschool, simple tools that families can use at home could help children from lower-income backgrounds enter school better prepared. The project aims to produce low-cost videos and materials that help parents weave math talk and gestures into play and daily routines, and to show which families benefit most from them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Geary
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Psychology
Track the longitudinal development of core number knowledge, such as cardinality and counting, in preschoolers to identify early signs of school math readiness and math learning disability risk.
Ece Demir-Lira
University of Iowa, IA·Psychology
Test a serial mediation model in which gestational age at birth affects children's number skills through their verbal skills and then through the brain systems for numbers, measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Jude Cassidy
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Test whether adding the Circle of Security – Parenting intervention to Early Head Start services reduces insecure attachment, physiological dysregulation and behavior problems, in a randomized trial of 249 parent-child pairs.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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