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

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.