Parenting and pre-school children's learning in Malaysia: risk factors, interventions effects, and the wider LMIC context.

联合国可持续发展目标4的一项具体目标是确保所有儿童在阅读和数学方面至少达到最低熟练程度。然而，这一目标仍远未实现，特别是在中低收入国家。因此，在2019冠状病毒病大流行之前，据估计，低收入和中等收入国家中有一半以上的儿童处于“学习贫困”状态，即到10岁时无法阅读简单的文本，自2019年以来，这一统计数据进一步恶化。此外，虽然在大流行病之前，受教育的机会有所改善，但这并没有导致学习的相应改善。因此，一直有支持儿童在校外学习的尝试。我建议发表一篇论文，调查低收入国家（即马来西亚）对儿童校外学习的支持。我提出的博士研究将被纳入对马来西亚国家政府学校系统中父母干预的可接受性、有效性和可扩展性的更广泛调查中。干预措施将在一项因子随机对照试验中进行评估，以确定数字、远程和面对面组件的最有效组合，以改善育儿、通过游戏学习和儿童结局。这项研究为我进行博士研究提供了一个理想的机会。我计划围绕三篇论文发表一篇论文：I)使用马来西亚研究的原始数据，分析儿童学习的风险因素，这在马来西亚和其他中低收入国家几乎没有数据。这项调查可以揭示与儿童认知发展相关的特殊因素，这些因素与高收入国家所确定的不同，从而能够更有效地针对弱势群体进行干预。ii)分析父母干预对儿童学习结果的影响，并且，由于干预效果已被发现根据环境和人口因素而变化，分析干预效果的调节因子，发现可能改进干预设计和内容。3)父母干预对中低收入国家3-5岁儿童学习改善的系统回顾和荟萃分析。这将为该领域增加特别的价值，因为最近发表的评论主要集中在0-3岁的儿童身上，对他们的干预措施有所不同。因此，我的研究将为有关父母干预以改善儿童教育成果的文献做出贡献。此外，在干预措施的可扩展性方面，它将有助于一个日益重要的领域，即数字化和远程提供干预内容的可行性和有效性。

One target of UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 is to ensure that all children achieve at least a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics. This target is, however, still far from being reached, especially in low-middle-income-countries (LMICs). Thus, before the COVID-19 pandemic, over half of children in LMCs were estimated to be in "learning poverty" - i.e., were not able to read a simple text by age ten - and since 2019 this statistic has worsened. Furthermore, although prior to the pandemic improvements had been made in access to schooling, this has not led to corresponding improvement to learning. Accordingly, there have been attempts to support children's learning outside school. I propose to produce a thesis by publication investigating support for children's out-of-school learning in an LMIC, namely Malaysia. My proposed doctoral research would be embedded within a wider investigation of the acceptability, effectiveness, and scalability of a parenting intervention delivered within a Malaysian national government school system. The intervention is to be evaluated in a factorial randomised controlled trial to determine the most effective combination of digital, remote, and in-person components to improve parenting, learning through play, and child outcomes. This study provides me with an ideal opportunity to carry out doctoral research. I plan to present a thesis framed around three papers for publication: i) Using primary data from the Malaysian study, an analysis of the risk factors to children's learning, for which there are little data in Malaysia and other LMICs. This enquiry could reveal particular factors associated with child cognitive development that differ from those identified in HICs, thereby enabling more effective targeting of vulnerable groups for intervention. ii) An analysis of the parenting intervention's effect on children's learning outcomes, and, since intervention effects have been found to vary according to environmental and demographic factors, analysis of moderators of intervention effects, with findings potentially improving intervention design and content. iii) A systematic review and meta-analysis of parenting interventions to improve 3-5- year-olds' learning in LMICs. This would add particular value to the field because recently published reviews have focussed on 0-3-year-old children, for whom interventions differ. Thus, my research would contribute to the body of literature pertaining to parenting interventions to improve child educational outcomes. Further, it would contribute to an area of emerging importance in the context of the scalability of interventions, namely the feasibility and efficacy of digital and remote delivery of intervention content.