Poster #141 - Examining Individual Variability in Parental Number Talk During Math Activities at Home

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

The development of children’s math abilities has been studied in relation to multiple factors in the home environment, including the conversations that occur during parent-child interaction and the activities parents and children choose to engage in. Studies have shown that children’s early math skills are predicted by parents’ use of number words during everyday interaction (i.e. number talk; Levine et al., 2010; Susperreguy & Davis-Kean, 2016). In addition, the frequency with which children engage in math-related activities in the home relate to children’s math skills, but measures of these activities are typically drawn from parental reports (Elliot & Bachman, 2018, but see Levine et al., 2010). A handful of studies have compared math talk across various activities and found that some activities are more likely to foster conversations about math than others (Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2009), but there is still substantial variability in math talk during activities that are unrelated to math, such as book reading (Anderson, Anderson, & Shapiro, 2004). In this study, we observe parent number talk by observing naturalistic play over a wide range of activities to understand how parent and child characteristics such as gender and race as well as parental education and household income may influence number talk during different types of activities.

Ninety three-and four-year-old children (46 boys) and their parents (6 fathers) participated in this study. Parent-child dyads were video-recorded at home while playing with toys of their choice for ten minutes on three separate occasions. All videos were subsequently transcribed and coded for the amount of parent number words and the total number of words used. In addition, activities were coded as math-related or not (see Table 1 for a list of activity codes). For each parent-child activity (roughly 3 per each 10 minute session), a parent number word proportion was calculated by dividing the total number words by the total spoken words overall.

A series of three-level hierarchical logistic regression models were estimated (i.e., activities nested within sessions nested within dyads) to predict the likelihood of number word usage during each activity observed. Level one predictors included whether the activity was math-related, the length of the activity, and the total number of words used by the parent during the activity, and level 3 predictors included child gender and parent gender, education, income, and race/ethnicity. As expected, number talk was significantly more likely to occur in activities that were math-related. Additionally, number talk was marginally more likely to occur among parents with higher levels of education. Significant interactions between whether the activity was math-related and both income and child gender emerged. Although math-related activities were more likely to elicit parental number talk, this effect became smaller at higher income levels. Additionally, the difference between number talk in math-related and non-math-related activities was significantly larger for girls than for boys, as there were no significant differences in number talk across activities for boys. These findings suggest that math activities may foster conversations about math, but the nature of these relations varies significantly by parent and child characteristics.

Authors

• Jyothirmayi Thippana, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Gehman, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author