Marianella Casasola and Ana Maria Cañas investigate how parents understand their role in their children’s cognitive development.

1. Implications
• Interventions designed to promote school readiness
should address parental beliefs of child learning,
particularly during informal interactions, such as play.
• Play activities can be easily used to enrich children’s
exposure to language and can bolster early learning.
Johanna O’Reilly (left), undergraduate research assistant, and Ana Maria Cañas
(right), Cornell Cooperative Extension Research/Development Specialist and Family
Educator, setting up a parent-child play task in a daycare center in Brooklyn, NY.
Photo: Johanna O’Reilly
RESEARCH BRIEF SERIES
January 2019
Creating Family Learning Partnerships to Promote Early Learning
By Marianella Casasola and Ana Maria Cañas, Cornell University
Background
• Parents’ speech to their
young children
promotes early
language skills and is
linked to later
academic outcomes.
• Parents vary widely in
the quantity and
quality of speech to
their young children.
Research Questions
• Do parents view play as
one venue for
promoting early
learning?
• Can we shape parents’
beliefs about child
learning?
Findings
1. Parents vary widely in whether they view play as important
for learning
2. Parents who believed that play promotes learning provided
more labels to their young children during play.
3. Parents in an intervention increased the quality of their
speech to their child during a play activity.
4. Young children provided with new words during play
demonstrated gains in their vocabulary.
Parents talking to their young children
Children’s early language skills
Children’s later school success
For more information about Cornell Project 2Gen visit www.2gen.bctr.cornell.edu or contact us at project2gen@cornell.edu.
This research was made possible by the generous contributions of Cornell Project 2Gen and an anonymous donor.