P1 + P2 Parents/Guardians

For the attention of Parents/Guardians of P1 + P2 Pupils,

We have received a request from Dr. Paddy O’ Connor, Lecturer in Education, at the School of Psychology, Queen’s University, Belfast to share the following…

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Dear Sir/Madam,

I am getting in touch to ask whether your school might be able to assist me with a research project which concerns validating a questionnaire to identify young children who may need some assistance with mathematics.

The purpose of the study is to ask parents (who have children in Primary 1 and/or Primary 2) to complete a short questionnaire, which asks them to rate the extent to which their child is able to carry out tasks which involve some kind of ordering skills, as well as asking parents to give some demographic information about themselves and their child. Previous research has found that these skills may be important to young children’s Maths learning. We are trying to validate this questionnaire with a large number of parents, so that in the future, this questionnaire could be used to identify young children who may need some help with learning maths during the foundation years.

I am writing to you to ask if you could display a link to the questionnaire on your online bulletin board, for the attention of Parents of children in Primary 1 and Primary 2 only. When the parents open the link, they will be asked to complete a consent form. We do not need any personal information about pupils, apart from their date of birth in order to calculate their exact age, and their gender. No identifying information about pupils would be accessible in any data files associated with the study or any reports that are written up about our findings.

Here is the link to the study: http://go.qub.ac.uk/mathsresearch

I appreciate that there are many demands on schools, but hope that you will consider this project worthwhile. I hope that your school can assist us with this research.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Paddy O’Connor