Measuring Parental Math Stimulation for Young Children

• In Event: 2-024 - From the Lab to the Field: Using Early Math Development Research to Improve Educational Practice

Integrative Statement

In the burgeoning area of research addressing parental influences on young children’s math development, several measures of math stimulation are frequently utilized. Many studies rely on parental reports of the frequency of math activities, such as playing with board games or puzzles (e.g., LeFevre et al., 2009). Other researchers directly observe the frequency of these activities in the homes of families with young children (e.g., Levine et al., 2010). However, there is mixed evidence regarding the role of math stimulation for children’s math skills. While parents’ use of number words with their children, or number talk, consistently predicts children’s math skills (e.g., Levine et al., 2010; Susperreguy & Davis-Kean, 2016), parental report is not consistently associated with children’s skills (Elliott & Bachman, 2018). Thus, important questions remain regarding the psychometric properties and independence of measures of math stimulation. Here, we explore the reliability of parental report and direct observation for measuring math input and examine correlations among measures.

Participants included 97 three- and four-year-old children (50 boys) and their parents (6 fathers). Dyads visited the lab on two occasions two months apart; at each visit, parents reported how frequently in the past two weeks they had engaged in 20 different math activities and played with their children with a standard set of toys for ten minutes. These interactions were coded for the amount of number words used by the parent. In order to account for overall language input, the total number of words used by the parent during these ten minutes was also counted and used to calculate a proportion score (i.e., number word count ÷ total word count). In between visits, parents and children were video-recorded while playing in their homes for ten minutes up to three times. These videos were then coded for the amount of time spent in math-related activities (e.g., playing board games or with a cash register), and number talk proportion scores were calculated for these interactions.

Parent-reported math activities, and parent number talk during free play in the lab were stable across the two visits, r(87) = .81, p < .001, and r(69) = .27, p = .02, respectively. Time spent in math activities at home was also fairly stable (α = .48), with two of the three correlations reaching conventional significance levels. However, number talk during the home observations were largely unrelated across time (α = .14), as only one of the three correlations between observations reached trend level. Composite scores of each measure were then calculated. Only time spent in math activities was significantly associated with all other measures (Table 1). These findings suggest that parental report and direct observations in the lab and the home reflect unique components of parental math stimulation and may have distinct implications for children’s math skills.

Preliminary analyses suggest that home math activities correlate more strongly with children’s skills, suggesting that promoting home math activities may be an important direction for future intervention.

Authors

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jyothirmayi Thippana, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Gehman, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author