# Leadership: Training Young Learning Disability Researchers

> **NIH NIH P20** · UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA · 2022 · $79,322

## Abstract

Project Summary - Leadership
There is substantive variation in preschooler’s understanding of the core number concepts (e.g.,
cardinality) and associated skills (e.g., counting; Geary & VanMarle 2016) that are predictive of later
individual differences in readiness to learn formal math at school entry (Geary et al. 2018) and risk of
math LD (Chu et al. 2019). Child-centered interventions reduce these gaps (Dumas et al. 2019) but suffer
from fade out and thus do not typically confer long-term benefits (Bailey, 2019). Similar fade out is found
with individual therapy with young offenders, but sustained gains can be achieved with multisystemic
interventions involving the child, home, and school (Henggeler et al. 2009). Future interventions for
students who are at risk for math difficulties or math LD will likely need to adopt this multisystemic
approach, but most research and training is focused on child-centered factors, such as the development of
specific academic competencies or general abilities, such as working memory, that contribute to this
development. Although training in these areas is critical, it is relatively narrow and might lead to
researchers overlooking contextual factors that could contribute to the development of core early
quantitative competencies that support school readiness and risk of math LD. These contextual factors
likely include the attitudes and math competencies that parents bring to parent-child conservations about
mathematics, the home environment as related academic development generally, and students’
engagement in classroom settings (Gray et al., 2017; Zippert & Rittle-Johnson 2020). To facilitate the
next generations’ consideration of the multisystemic factors that influence math learning and risk of math
LD, graduate students and a post-doctoral scholar will receive training and experiences in child-centered,
parent- and home-centered, and classroom engagement assessments. An early assistant professor (Co-I
Rodrigues) who specializes in fractions interventions for students with math LD will serve as a mentee to
become familiar with the early mathematics development literature and through this expand her capacity
to broadly contribute to future math LD research. She will also work with the team, graduate students, and
the post-doctoral scholar on planning a multisystemic intervention for preschoolers who are at risk for
long-term difficulties with learning mathematics based on results from a multisystemic (including
children, parents, home environment, and classroom experiences) longitudinal study of early mathematics
development. The PI and Co-Is have broad expertise in cognitive science, parent-child dynamics, public
policy, and intervention research that in turn will provide a unique mentoring experience for graduate
students and a post-doctoral fellow that will better prepare them to study and conceptualize the multiple
factors that likely contribute to math learning difficulties and math LD.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10533028
- **Project number:** 1P20HD109951-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
- **Principal Investigator:** DAVID C GEARY
- **Activity code:** P20 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $79,322
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-08-30 → 2026-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10533028

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10533028, Leadership: Training Young Learning Disability Researchers (1P20HD109951-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10533028. Licensed CC0.

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