Investigating the Role of Parents' Knowledge of Early Math Skills and Home Math Support

• In Event: Broadening Our Understanding of Early Math Support at Home and at School

Abstract

The current study examined the role of parents’ knowledge of early math development in the home math support they provide their four-year-olds. It is grounded in parent socialization theory [1], and work applying the theory to home math literature [2], which posits that parents’ expectations regarding their children’s academic achievement shape how they support their children academically which in turn impacts their children’s academic achievement. We asked how parents’ knowledge about early math development, which we refer to as “parents’ knowledge” for brevity, relates to the frequency and complexity of parent math support. We hypothesized that parents’ numeracy knowledge is positively related to the frequency and complexity of their numeracy support. We predicted the same for patterning.
As part of a larger study, parents of four-year-olds (N = 107; 85% mothers) completed a survey on their home math support and parents’ knowledge. Most parents had at least a bachelor’s degree (74%) and identified as White (54%) or Black (36%). The survey on parents’ support asked: “How often do you do the following activities with your child?” for 15 numeracy, 16 patterning, and 7 spatial activities on a 5-point Likert scale. Frequency of support was an average of their ratings on activities by domain and complexity of support was an average of their ratings of activities considered advanced skills in numeracy and patterning domains. Parents’ support reliability ranged from ok to good (α = .79-.93). The survey of parents’ knowledge asked “Which of these academic skills are appropriate to work on with typically developing 4-year-old children in the United States?” about 10 numeracy, 10 patterning, and 5 spatial skills. We focus on skills within the developmental range, where the correct answer was “yes”, (7 numeracy, 7 patterning, 4 spatial), to improve scale reliability. Parents’ knowledge reliability was good for numeracy (α = .73), ok for patterning (α = .59), but poor for spatial (α = .41).
As shown in Table 1, parents had high numeracy, patterning, and spatial knowledge about what a typical four-year-old child can do. Parents’ frequency of support ranged from once a week to a few times a month, while more complex numeracy and patterning support occurred between a few times a week to once a month. Correlations (Table 2) showed parents’ numeracy knowledge was positively related to the complexity of their numeracy support, but not the frequency of their support, and patterning knowledge was not related to either type of support.
Overall, our knowledge measure was reliable, replicating previous findings in a new sample [3]. One explanation for not finding a relationship between patterning knowledge and support was the near-ceiling scores for patterning knowledge. Previous research indicates that parents rarely provide support about the more complex early math topics and that this complexity is a better predictor of children’s math skills than frequency of support. Thus, our results indicating a significant relation between parents’ numeracy knowledge and the complexity of their numeracy support provides insight into why parents generally engage in complex math support infrequently and highlights a potentially malleable variable.

Authors

• Camille Msall, Vanderbilt University

• Ashli-Ann Douglas, WestEd

• Bethany Rittle-Johnson, Vanderbilt University