What is the value-added of a parental component to a junior kindergarten enrichment program focused on number skills for low-income children?
Low income parents are at risk of offering their young children less in support of numerical skill development. As a result, many children do not develop an intuitive representation of numbers that is essential for success in first-grade. We examine the value added of a parent training component integrated within a classroom-based prekindergarten enrichment program designed to enhance children's requisite knowledge for formal learning of arithmetic. The results suggest that adding parental support to stimulate the cognitive precursors to first grade arithmetic influences more positive numberline knowledge. Children whose parents received training developed more extensive number knowledge than children having followed the school-based program without parent training, and this, above and beyond initial number knowledge of the children. However, we observed inconclusive results when comparing children having receive the parent training component of the program (parent-training group) with those whose parents consented but never attended the parent training component (a consent-control group). Various potential factors being able to explain these results are discussed.