Poster #82 - Parent Ratings of Preschoolers’ Numeracy Skills Predictive of Directly Assessed Overall Numeracy Ability

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Children’s early numeracy skills are important for the development of later, more complex skills (Baroody, Lai, & Mix, 2006). The home numeracy environment (HNE) is one context that these skills develop in. Parent perceptions of children’s numeracy skills are related to children’s HNE (Zippert & Ramani, 2017). Parents need to have an accurate understanding of children’s abilities in order to provide appropriate support. Understanding how parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills are related to children’s direct assessments can have implications for the measures used to quantify children’s abilities. If parent ratings of children’s mathematics abilities are well aligned with direct assessments, parent ratings of children’s abilities may be a low-cost alternative to direct assessments.

Research Questions: We aim to understand how parent ratings of preschoolers’ numeracy skills are related to children’s direct assessments and ask the following research questions (RQs):
RQ1) Are parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills (i.e., verbal counting, simple sums, numeral identification) more highly correlated with children’s direct assessments in these areas or their broader numeracy skills?
RQ2) Are parent ratings of children’s overall numeracy skills, measured as a latent variable of individually rated numeracy skills, uniquely related to direct assessments of children’s broad numeracy skills and not other school readiness domains (i.e., executive function, expressive vocabulary)?

Method: Participants (N = 129) were mostly mothers (84.50%) and were relatively well-educated (26.4% high school degree or less, 27.1% some college or Associate’s), 46.5% Bachelor’s or higher). Children included in the sample ranged from 3.07 to 5.95 years old (M = 4.62), and were mostly White (80.95%) and males (52.3%). To address RQ 1, we conducted correlated correlation analyses (Meng, Rosenthal, & Rubin, 1992). To address RQ 2, structural equation models were used to examine the relation between parent ratings of children’s overall numeracy skills, and direct assessments of children’s broad numeracy skills, executive function (EF), and expressive vocabulary.

Results: Findings for RQ1 indicated that parent ratings of children’s verbal counting and simple sums were more highly correlated with children’s direct assessments of broad numeracy skills than the specific respective numeracy skills; however, only the correlations for verbal counting were significantly different (See Table 1). Results for RQ2 indicated that after controlling for EF and expressive vocabulary, parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills predicted directly assessed broad numeracy skills (See Figure 1). Further, robustness checks indicated that parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills did not predict other school readiness skills when children’s directly assessed broad numeracy skills were controlled for.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills are more global than targeted to individual numeracy skills. However, parent ratings of children’s broad numeracy skills are specific to numeracy and not global ratings of school readiness. Thus, when aggregated, parent ratings of children’s numeracy skills can be a valid measure for children’s broad numeracy abilities These findings have broad implications for how parent-ratings of child outcomes might be used in studies when researchers may not have the resources to incorporate direct child assessments.

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