The Role of Parent Math Anxiety on Parent Math Involvement and Student Math Knowledge

• In Event: 2-076 - Supporting Children’s Early Mathematics Learning: Understanding the Role of the Home Environment

Integrative Statement

Research has documented pervasive achievement gaps in children’s math knowledge that emerge even prior to kindergarten (e.g., Clements & Sarama, 2007) and tend to persist as children progress through school (Duncan et al., 2007). Unsurprisingly, variations in parents’ engagement of math activities at home are associated with differences in the number knowledge that children possess at school entry (e.g., Gunderson & Levine, 2011). Factors such as a parent’s math ability and socio-economic (SES) background relate to both variation in parents’ home numeracy practices and children’s achievement in mathematics (e.g., Elliot et al., 2017). Research has also found that a parent’s anxiety about math may negatively impact children’s math achievement during the school years (Maloney et al., 2015), yet little work has explored the impact of parent math anxiety on parent involvement in children’s math education despite the fact that young children spend most of their time at home.

In the current study we look at the influence of parent math anxiety on children’s math knowledge at the start of preschool and kindergarten, as mediated by parent math involvement at home. While past studies have found mixed results with regards to the importance of parents’ engagement in activities such as homework help and providing opportunities for math learning at home, parents’ attitudes towards math achievement may be a particularly important aspect of parent involvement in math education (e.g., Kleemans, Peeters, Segers, & Verhoeven, 2012). Here we operationalize parent math attitudes in terms of their expectations and values for their children’s achievement in math.

Parents of 317 Pre-K (n = 102) and Kindergarten (n = 215) children in the Chicagoland area participated in this study. Parents were asked to fill out surveys which collected information about family income and parents’ education level (used to create a composite SES variable), and included questionnaires asking about parents’ anxiety about math (short-Mathematics Anxiety Rating scale; Alexander & Martray, 1989) and their expectations and values of math for their children. Additionally, we obtained a measure of students’ math knowledge using the WJ III Applied Problems subtest (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001).

A regression analysis controlling for SES found that there was a marginally significant negative direct effect of parent math anxiety on children’s performance on our measure of math knowledge at school entry (b = 3.14, SE = 1.94, p < .10). However, using a bootstrap estimation method with 5000 samples, we found a significant indirect effect of parent math anxiety on student math achievement (b = -2.71, SE = 1.11, 95% CI [-5.18, -.78]). The majority of this indirect effect was accounted for by the pathway through parents’ expectations and values for their children in math (b = -2.41, SE = 1.00, 95% CI [-4.58, -.69]). These findings show that parents’ feelings of anxiety about math are related to their perceptions of their children’s math ability as well as how they communicate their expectations and value of math to their children, factors which in turn are related to differences in children’s math outcomes.

Authors

• Talia Berkowitz, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Susan C. Levine, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author