BUDS Challenge MINI Project — Adult Support for Learning Around The World

(By Country & Wealth)

Education is the key to child development, whether a child belongs to a high- or low-income family. Before that child sets foot in a school, though, they will have long since started learning at home. For our BUDS Challenge MINI Project, we were interested in finding out how adults are supporting their young children’s learning around the world, and whether family income has an effect on that.

To start our research, we gathered data from the UN data library, which has many useful datasets. We used UNICEF’s “Early Childhood Development” dataset and focused on “Adult Support for Learning,” which is somewhat wordily defined as

Percentage of children 36–59 months old with whom an adult has engaged in four or more of the following activities to promote learning and school readiness in the past three days: a) reading books to the child, b) telling stories to the child, c) singing songs to the child, d) taking the child outside the home, e) playing with the child and f) naming, counting or drawing things with the child.

Studies show these activities promote learning in young children, particularly language and early literacy.

We started cleaning the data based on our needs, and decided to analyze the Wealth and Country factors. We were interested in how different countries practice this type of support for learning, and how a family’s income might be linked to more or less support. Our hypothesis was that in all countries, low-income families (defined as belonging to the lowest 20% of income) would show less adult support for learning than wealthy families (belonging to the highest 20%). Because these families often have fewer resources and less time available, as well as higher levels of stress and poorer physical and mental health, they may find it harder to prioritize learning activities at home.

Analysis

During our analysis we revealed these interesting findings:

• Low-income families show a lower rate of adult support for learning than high-income families in all but one of the studied countries.
• The African continent shows an overall lower rate of support than other parts of the world. However, there are some interesting positive outliers in North and Central Africa. Eastern and Southern Europe show the overall highest rates of support.
• When looking at the lowest-earning populations, a diverse array of countries worldwide show a lower adult support rate. When looking at the highest-earning populations, the support rate largely evens out at the high end.
• Countries where the overall support rate is low are slightly more likely to have a bigger support gap between high- and low-income families.

Adult support for learning by country, overall

This graph shows the percentage of young children being supported in their learning by adults. In the investigated countries (68 in total), the mean adult support rate is 64.66%. When broken down by global region, the median rate of African countries is 47.67%, while the rates for the other three regions studied are 74.9% for the Americas, 68.68% for Asia, and 93.51% for Europe.

However, when broken down further (by sub-region and by country), we see an interesting spread of results in Africa. The mean rate of support in Northern Africa is 61.17%, significantly higher than that of Sub-Saharan Africa at 45.9%, and largely impacted by one negative outlier in Morocco (34.5%) — the median rate in the North is 70.9%. On the other hand, within Sub-Saharan Africa, the Central African Republic (73.7%) and Somalia (79.1%) are multiple standard deviations above most of their neighbors. We have not yet investigated the reason for these differences. By sub-region, Eastern Europe shows the highest rate of support (94.1%), while Southern Europe is a close second (93.2%). Montenegro (97.7%), Ukraine (97.5%), and Trinidad and Tobago (97.6%) are the overall highest worldwide.

Adult support for learning by country, lowest 20% of income

When we looked into the low-income group’s data, there was a wide range of results. While most African countries continued to show the lowest adult support, some non-African countries also showed significantly low support among low-income families.

For example, Mongolia’s average adult support rate is 54.7%, but it goes down to 38.3% for the low-income group. Iraq, a country with an average 58.2% adult support rate, only shows 40.3% in the low-income group. Honduras’ metric goes down from 47.80% to 27.80%, and the Dominican Republic goes down from 58.1% to 38%. In other words, where support may have been moderate in the total population in these countries, it is significantly less in low-income families.

On the other hand, countries with an overall high level of support tended to stay high amongst low-income earners. For example, Trinidad and Tobago’s metric fell only to 95.7%, Ukraine’s to 95.3%, Montenegro’s to 92.7%. Georgia was the only country to actually increase its rate in this group, with 83.3% overall but 84.65% in low-income families.

Adult support for learning by country, highest 20% of income

For the high-income earners, the overall adult support rate increases across the board. While Sub-Saharan African countries still tend to have a lower support rate (59.55%), most sub-regions (including North Africa) have mean rates of support above 80%. In countries where support was already high, it tends to max out with the high-income group at levels of 99% or even 100% for Trinidad and Tobago.

In comparison to the low-income group (55.93%), the high-income group (77.71%) shows about 40% higher adult support rate for their children’s education. Checking where these differences came from could also be an interesting topic, so we looked into the ratio of low-income / high income families to see which regions showed the most significant difference.

Adult support for learning by country, ratio of low-income / high-income families

Based on our data, in all but one country, high-income families show more adult support for learning than low-income families. Georgia, which has more 4% more adult support in the lowest 20% than the highest 20%, is the only exception. Countries with a lower support rate overall also have a slight tendency to have a sharper divide between the highest and the lowest income earners.

In other words, high-income families are usually more likely than low-income families to engage in learning activities with their young children (except, for unknown reasons, in Georgia). In countries where the adult support rate is low to begin with, this gap may be slightly magnified.

Conclusions

From this quick research we can see that the income gap does appear to be linked with young children’s learning activities at home, which supports our hypothesis. Worldwide, sub-Saharan African countries showed the lowest overall support for learning, while Southern and Eastern Europe showed the overall highest. Other regions, such as the Caribbean, had notably mixed results. One limitation we had was that we only had data for 68 countries and are obviously missing most of the world’s largest economies. At this time, it is not clear what causes the difference in support for learning between countries; while income appears to have an impact at home, it does not appear to at the national level. It may be that in some countries, especially in the low-income group, parents are not aware of the importance of educational support, or cannot provide proper support because of lack of resources, so children cannot get enough support from their home.

Early child learning plays an important factor in a child’s development as they grow older. Children with and without learning support at home are likely to see differences when they first attend school. To mitigate this problem, our recommendation is that in these low-support countries, the government can try to support these young children by providing more public libraries where parents can borrow story books and activity books that will help the child in learning. Parents can also learn how to take part themselves even if they do not have the income: they can teach the child the alphabet by singing to them, for example, or showing them pictures of letters in a newspaper or street sign. If they do not have much education themselves, they can still help by talking to their children often, playing with them, telling stories, and drawing.

In countries with more governmental resources to invest in education, they could also build a local community center where volunteers can help young children’s early education, so that children who cannot get enough support from adults in their home also can get needed help from the public. These kind of efforts will improve the child’s ability to learn.

I want to thank my team for their help on this awesome project. I served as “project manager,” did some of the intermediary data analysis, and wrote/edited the final report, but I could not have done anything without:

• Isra Khan, who handled all the data cleaning and heavily contributed to this report.
• Sonya, who created all the visualizations and also contributed to this report.

Thank you also to Udacity/Bertelsmann and to the organizers of this publication for the opportunity.

References

Data Sources:

UNdata. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://data.un.org/

UNICEF Early Childhood Development, Home Environment. (December 2017). Retrieved from https://data.unicef.org/topic/early-childhood-development/home-environment/

Literature Review:

Maggi, S., Irwin, L. G., Siddiqi, A., Poureslami, I., et al. (2006). “Analytic and Strategic Review Paper: International Perspectives on Early Child Development.” Working Papers id:690, eSocialSciences.

New York University. (2018, April 30). Proximity to books and adult support enhance children’s learning opportunities. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 4, 2018 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180430160455.htm

Steensel, R. V. (2006). Relations between socio-cultural factors, the home literacy environment and childrens literacy development in the first years of primary education. Journal of Research in Reading, 29(4), 367–382. doi:10.1111/j.1467–9817.2006.00301.x

Weisberg, D. S., Zosh, J. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2013). Talking It Up: Play, Language Development, and the Role of Adult Support. American Journal of Play, 6(1), 39–54.