Charissa Fernandez, Chief Operating Officer of TASC, shared this blog post, which originally ran on the ExpandedEdSchools blog. If you’d like to share a post on the Grade-Level Reading blog, please send a copy to pjordan@gradelevelreading.net

We hear a lot about the importance of giving our earliest learners a strong foundation in literacy, but what about math? Do kids also need to enter school knowing basic mathematical concepts?

According to a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE, giving kids early access to math education is key to eliminating achievement gaps and preparing students for success in school and beyond. Older students without this early foundation performed lower on “functional numeracy” tests designed to measure their ability to perform tasks required in the modern workplace. Nationally, nearly one-quarter of adults do not have the math skills expected of an eighth grader, making them functionally innumerate (the mathematical equivalent of functionally illiterate) and unable to hold many jobs.

The study piqued my curiosity because of a recent plea from my son’s second grade teacher that parents not help their children with math homework given that the method of teaching of math has changed so much since we learned it. This was a huge challenge since my husband and I both love math and he used to be a math teacher. This study suggests that while “carrying the 1” may no longer be in vogue, we should keep working family math problems on the refrigerator white board.

It’s also exciting because 1) math is the area in which informal educators have most often made measurable progress and 2) this may provide an important opening for parents of English language learners to more comfortably engage in their children’s education.

We reached out to one of the study’s authors, David C. Geary, Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who was kind enough to answer a few questions:

What are the math skills kids should have before they enter first grade? What happens to kids who don’t have this foundation?

Once they start behind it is very difficult to catch up, because of the hierarchical nature of math.

In later grades, girls are far less interested in math and science than boys. Did you find a gender gap in your research on early learners?

We didn’t look at interests. In the grades we studied, all kids take the same math and so interests aren’t as important as they are in high school and college.

Early childhood education has been in the news ever since President Obama proposed to make it universal. What advice about math would you give to policymakers who are considering this?

First, it needs to be taken much more seriously. Second, we really need to better understand how to teach the skills above to kids, especially those who aren’t getting much number experience at home. The National Institutes of Health invested heavily in this type of research for reading and we made substantial gains, and they are starting to do this for math. It’s better to do the research up front to determine what works before implementing one policy after the next that fails.

As a child, what did you do when your school day ended at 3 PM? What’s your favorite way to keep learning outside of work today?

I mostly played outside after school and enjoyed collecting insects, lizards, etc. Now, I read a lot on a variety of topics. I also invest in keeping my quantitative skills as up to date as I can.