About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 4. Cognitive Processes

Abstract

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Engaging in math activities with caregivers has the potential to support young children’s
math learning, with implications for their later math and academic achievement. Social media is a free and accessible method for caregivers and educators to find and share learning activities for young children, and studies have demonstrated that parents and educators consider social media a source for information and resource sharing (Duggan et al., 2015; Larsen & Liljedahl, 2017). Despite this, little research has investigated the features and qualities of what is available for supporting early math development on social media as a whole. Similar to other sources of math and educational activities, the activities suggested on social media may or may not be representative of early math content areas or based in evidence about early learning (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). To address this, the current study examined math activities posted on social media for preschool-aged children.

We identified early math activities (n = 216) posted on TikTok and coded activity content and the extent to which activities aligned with theoretical and empirical evidence on promoting early learning and mathematical cognition. Specifically, each activity was coded for primary math content area (Table 1), inclusion of numbers and level of numbers included (e.g., 1 to 10 or greater than 10; DePascale & Ramani, 2024; Powell & Nurnberger-Haag, 2015), and whether the activity included features that align with theoretical and empirical evidence on promoting learning. We identified three principles (meaningfulness, alignment between math content and representation, and guidance/feedback) from research on early math cognition and theories of playful learning (e.g., Laski & Siegler, 2014; Zosh et al., 2018). Each principle was coded binarily (i.e., 0=not including that feature, 1=including that feature), and the sum of all features (i.e., alignment total) was used as a variable in analysis (i.e., total range: 0 to 3).

Results indicated that the most frequent content areas were Number/Numeral Identification (37%), Counting/Cardinality/One-to-One Correspondence (18%) and Arithmetic (16%). The majority (60%) of activities were at the basic number level (i.e., numbers 1 to 10) and very few (<4%) activities included the number zero.

Considering alignment with theoretical and empirical evidence on promoting early learning, there was variability in alignment total scores (M=1.39, range 0 to 3). Although the majority of activities (84%) aligned with at least one of the developmental and learning science principles, only 12% of activities aligned with all three principles and 16% of activities did not align with any. There were no differences in alignment total by math content area (F(5, 201)=1.594, p=.163), indicating that average alignment with developmental and learning science principles did not differ by content area (Figure 1).

These findings indicate that while there are many early learning activities available to caregivers and educators on social media, there remain substantial opportunities to (1) further incorporate math into early learning activities, (2) expand the areas of math content represented in these activities, and (3) better align activities with evidence-based best practices for supporting early math cognition and development.

Author information

Author	Role
Mary DePascale, Ph.D., University At Albany, SUNY	Presenting author
Juyun Lee, Boston College	Non-presenting author
Eric Dearing, Boston College	Non-presenting author

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