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Differences in children’s mathematics knowledge are evident at kindergarten entry, favoring children who have greater access to economic resources. Fostering preschoolers’ mathematics learning at home and in classroom settings, through games and other developmentally appropriate activities, is of great interest to educators, early childhood leaders, and policymakers. This cluster randomized trial examined the ef- fects of a naturalistic, game-based mathematics intervention implemented in Head Start classrooms and examined whether including a family math component added value. A total of 573 children (64% His- panic; 60% multilingual) were included from 66 classrooms which were randomly assigned to Classroom Math (CM), Classroom Math + Family Math (CM+FM), or business-as-usual (BAU). Results indicated that the family math component did add value to the classroom-based intervention as CM+FM resulted in a significant positive impact on children’s mathematics knowledge relative to BAU, but CM alone did not. For preschoolers age 50+ months, both interventions had significant effects on children’s mathemat- ics knowledge relative to BAU, but CM+FM had a stronger effect (d = .36). The number of math games played was significantly associated with higher mathematics scores and the number of family math mini- books returned had a significant impact on children’s spring scores, over and above the number of games played. The CM+FM intervention also had a significant effect on teachers’ instructional practice (d =.79). Adding a family math component to a game-based classroom intervention resulted in positive impacts for preschoolers and seems to be an effective, ecologically valid intervention that fosters early mathematical competencies. 

Collecting and organizing data to understand and answer real-world questions is an increasingly important skill in our current world. Fostering data collection and analysis (DCA) skills in young children leverages key mathematics skills as well as the data representation, visualization, and interpretation skills of computational thinking (CT), culminating in a problem-solving approach with data. As such, the intervention, comprising investigations and a digital app, supported preschool teachers and children to answer data-focused questions by engaging in each step of the DCA process in order to foster CT and math skills. Teachers appreciated that the app offers a new way for children to visualize data and noted that the app provided learning opportunities for children that would not otherwise be possible or easy to implement. Results also suggest that the app provides a systematic process for data collection, entry, and interpretation. Children in classrooms that completed the intervention had significantly higher scores at post-intervention compared to children in classrooms that did not complete the intervention, controlling for pre-intervention scores, B(SE) = 0.13(0.05), t (6) = 2.48, p = .048.