Poster #90 - The Relation Between Parent Math Anxiety and Parent-Child Math Interactions

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

Integrative Statement

Children who suffer from math anxiety, the fear of, or apprehension about, math tend to underperform at math, compared to those who are not math anxious (Ashcraft, 2002). Children can develop math anxiety as early as first grade, and the condition often persists throughout formal schooling and beyond. Studies of the inter-generational transmission of math anxiety suggest an association between high math anxiety in parents and poor math performance in their children (Berkowitz, et al., 2015).

Previous research suggests that math anxious parents may fail to support and even harm their children’s math learning during homework help (Maloney, Ramirez, Gunderson, Levine, & Beilock, 2015), but the means by which these interactions harm learning have not been thoroughly investigated. In the current study, we sought to examine the extent to which parent math anxiety influences parent/child math interactions in the home.

We videotaped parents completing three math tasks in their homes with their seventh-grade children, and coded the videos to discover whether elements of the parent-child dyad’s interactions would be predicted by parental math anxiety. The first math task involved judging the larger of two proportions, the second involved placing numbers on a number line, and the third involved discovering the pattern in Pascal’s Triangle and filling in missing values. Participants were 50 adult-child dyads. The children were aged twelve to fourteen (23 Female). The parents and caregivers were forty-five mothers, five fathers, and one grandmother.

The videos of these math interactions were transcribed and coded at the utterance level. Quasi-binomial regressions revealed that high math anxious parents produced a smaller percentage of the overall problem-solving strategies that the dyad generated (p=0.006), and disagreed with their child’s ideas less often (p=0.02), than lower math anxious parents.

Children’s math ability also played a role in shaping these interactions, with parents regardless of their own math anxiety level, offering fewer explanations of the problems to children who scored higher on the Woodcock Johnson applied problems test of math achievement (p=0.03). This finding suggests that, overall, parents are sensitive to their children’s math abilities.

These results suggest that higher math anxious parents are interacting differently with their children during math interactions in their home than lower math anxious parents. A similar dynamic may be in play during homework help throughout the school year. By providing relatively little guidance to their children in the form of problem-solving strategies, math anxious parents may be failing to support their children’s math learning and growth. Additionally, by rarely disagreeing with their children’s proposed ideas, math anxious parents are not giving the children needed feedback on their ideas, and may be sending a signal as to their lack of confidence in their own math abilities. Multiplied over development, these interactions may lead to less math learning, interest, and a tendency to avoid math on the part of the children of math anxious parents.

Authors

• Julianne B Herts, The University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Deena Bernett, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Lawlor, The University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marisha Kazi, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

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