UC Irvine

From birth, children’s environments pose opportunities for learning experiences that can foster their school readiness at kindergarten entry (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). A key environment for infants and toddlers is the home, where they develop in the context of interactions with their families. Another key environment are formal learning settings such as preschool, though distal policies influence the extent to which children can access them. This dissertation takes an ecological approach to understanding these proximal and distal influences on children’s school readiness (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). A strength of the dissertation is the use of samples that include fathers and also represent the experiences of non-white, bilingual families.

Studies 1 and 2 center on the home by exploring the mathematical environments infants and toddlers engage in with their parents. Study 1 codes video-recorded parent-child interactions during play to identify the extent to which parents use gestures with talk about mathematics. Study 1 findings show that while overall frequency of math gestures is low, parents vary considerably in their gesture use. It also finds that mothers engage in math gesturing more frequently than fathers, suggesting that parental nonverbal communication patterns differ by parental gender.

Study 2 explores the extent to which English-derived coding schemes of parental spatial talk that are translated to Spanish undercount expressions of spatial concepts by excluding verbs, which in Spanish can implicitly convey spatial concepts (compared to English, which primarily uses prepositions). By creating a Spanish-derived coding scheme to compare to results with the English-derived coding scheme, Study 2 finds that nearly half of the amount of discourse is missed when using an English-informed coding procedure because verbs are not included.

Finally, Study 3 uses an event study to estimate impacts of a federal policy on enrollment of 4-year-olds in pre-k, which is important because of its focus on school readiness skills. Results indicate that awarded states increased enrollment numbers; however, there is evidence of a positive policy diffusion effects in which non-awarded states went forward with increasing enrollment as well. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that taking an ecological approach that examines both children’s in-home experiences and access to out-of-home learning provides a more nuanced understanding of children’s experiences before they enter kindergarten.