Poster #90 - Reading Skills, Polysemous Word Knowledge, and Executive Functioning in Fourth Grade English Learners’ Mathematics Achievement

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Math word problems assess students’ mathematical knowledge. Yet, they also involve reading comprehension, which recruits executive functioning skills (EF; Georgiou & Das, 2018). Not surprisingly, reading comprehension predicts mathematical reasoning beyond word reading (Vilenius-Tuohimaa, Aunola, & Nurmi, 2008). Children with reading comprehension difficulties (RCD) have deficits in math word problem solving (Pimperton & Nation, 2010) and EF (Locascio, Mahone, Levine, Eason, & Cutting, 2010), leading investigators to assume similar problems may be responsible for students’ difficulties in both areas (Mann-Koepke & Miller, 2014). English learners (ELs) often look like children with RCD because their reading comprehension lags behind their age appropriate word reading (Mancilla-Martinez & Lesaux, 2010), and ELs also have difficulty with math word problem comprehension (Abedi & Lord, 2001). The little work in this area suggests ELs have trouble with linguistic complexity of math word problems (Martiniello, 2008) and lack math background knowledge, which improves with instruction (Driver & Powell, 2017). Another potential area of difficulty for ELs is that math word problems include ambiguous, multi-meaning words (e.g., "order" means something different in math than in everyday discourse; Pierce & Fontaine, 2009). English-monolingual (EM) children with RCD have difficulty with multi-meaning (polysemous) words (Yuill, 2009), and knowledge of academic and common meanings of polysemous words contributes to ELs’ reading comprehension (Logan & Kieffer, 2017). However, no work has examined the contribution of polysemous word knowledge (PWK) to math word problem performance in EL or EM students.

We examined contributions of PWK and EF to mathematics achievement in 199 fourth-grade students from a larger study (58.3% ELs; 44.7% Female; 62.3% Hispanic, 31.7% Black, 3.5% White, 2.5% other races/ethnicities) for whom we had PARRC Mathematics Achievement scores. We assessed students’ word reading, reading comprehension (Woodcock Johnson IV); inhibition (NEPSY inhibition), working memory (letters-backward, TOMAL-2), cognitive flexibility (Cartwright, 2002); and PWK, with a measure that required students to supply as many definitions as they knew for orally-presented words (Zipke et al., 2009). All key variables were significantly related to math achievement in EL and EM students. In the pooled sample, after controlling for reading comprehension, word reading, and free/reduced lunch status, hierarchical regression showed PWK contributed 2.8% unique variance to math achievement; and EFs contributed an additional 10.3% unique variance beyond all other variables, R-squared = .53, p = .000. Word reading, reading comprehension, and all three EFs remained significant predictors of math achievement on the final step. Parallel regressions for subgroups indicated the same pattern of results for ELs with the exception of inhibition (p = .064). For EMs, only word reading uniquely predicted math achievement, with a marginal contribution of inhibition (p = 079).

These findings are the first to demonstrate unique contributions of PWK to math achievement, though a math-specific assessment of PWK would likely yield more robust findings. No measures of math-specific PWK currently exist, which should be addressed in future work. These findings suggest spending time in PWK and EF interventions may benefit ELs’ math achievement.

Authors

• Kelly B Cartwright, Christopher Newport University
  Presenting Author

• Ana Taboada Barber, University of Maryland College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Casey Jonathan Archer, University of Maryland College Park
  Non-Presenting Author