Poster #79 - Links Between Caregivers’ Enjoyment of Math and Reading and Preschoolers’ Home Learning Environments

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Children’s home environments are linked to their academic outcomes and achievement (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2017). Caregivers’ beliefs and attitudes about literacy and mathematics may contribute to how they structure children’s home learning environments (Dearing & Tang, 2010; Sonnenschein et al., 2012). Considering that positive attitudes about learning activities are linked to greater personal engagement (Shapiro & Whitney, 1997) and negative attitudes are linked to avoidance (Hembree, 1990), caregivers’ enjoyment of academic subjects and activities are likely related to the learning activities they engage in with children at home. The role of caregiver enjoyment of literacy and mathematics on their behaviors has been considered as a component of their broader attitudes and behaviors related to these subjects (e.g., Skwarchuk, Sowinski, & LeFevre, 2014; Weigel, Martin, & Bennett, 2006). However, the independent relations between caregivers’ enjoyment of these subjects and the home literacy environment (HLE) and home numeracy environment (HNE) have not yet been addressed.

Aim: This study examines whether caregivers’ enjoyment of reading and mathematics are uniquely linked to preschoolers’ HLE and HNE, respectively. We hypothesize that caregiver enjoyment of reading will predict the HLE and their enjoyment of mathematics will predict the HNE.

Method: The sample included caregivers (n = 120)—mostly mothers (84.2%)—who were relatively well educated (8.3% high school diploma or equivalent, 17.5% some college, 10.8% Associate’s, 21.7% Bachelor’s, 41.6% graduate or postgraduate degree). Children ranged from 3.01 – 5.17 years old (M = 4.10; SD = 0.58) and were mostly White (70.0%) and males (53.3%). To address our research question, we used multiple regressions, controlling for caregiver and child demographic characteristics, as well as caregivers’ beliefs about the importance of these skills and how good they were at these skills when they were in school, to address the potentially confounding relations between these variables.

Results: Caregivers’ enjoyment of reading significantly predicted the HLE, β = .23, p = .023, R2 = .31, F(16,103) = 2.84. Analyses looking at individual HLE activities indicated that caregivers’ enjoyment of reading significantly predicted their frequency of engaging children in identifying letters, β = .22, p = .028, R2 = .34, F(16,103) = 3.25, but not other HLE activities. In contrast, caregivers’ enjoyment of mathematics did not predict the HNE, or individual HNE activities.

Conclusions: These findings contribute to our understanding of how caregivers choose to structure children’s home learning environments by identifying an independent relation between caregivers’ enjoyment of reading and the HLE. Findings are aligned with previous literature indicating that literacy attitudes may be linked to the HLE, but numeracy attitudes may not be linked to the HNE (Skwarchuk et al., 2014). Although the contributions of caregiver attitudes, more broadly, on children’s home learning environments have been examined in the past, we suggest a need to parse apart the role of specific attitudes regarding different learning activities. It may be that different caregiver attitudes are associated with children’s home learning environments in varying degrees and broader composite measures of caregiver attitude do not allow for distinction among attitudes.

Authors

• Joyce Lin, Purdue University
  Presenting Author

• Amy R. Napoli, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara Schmitt, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Purpura, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author