Parental Math Talk to Preschoolers is Most Helpful for Responsive Children

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Early math skills are important not only for later math performance (Jordan et al., 2006; Duncan et al., 2007) but also educational outcomes, career choice, income, and health and financial decisions (Agarwal & Mazumder, 2013; Currie & Thomas, 1999; Reyna & Brainerd, 2007; Trusty et al., 2000). In early childhood, parent math engagement is related to children’s math performance, where parents who engage in more frequent math activities and talk more frequently about math tend to have children who perform better in math (LeFevre et al., 2009; Levine et al., 2010). Some work suggests that particular types of math talk may be differently related to children’s math performance (Gunderson & Levine, 2011), and that asking abstract questions may be particularly useful for children’s numeracy development (Uscianowski et al., 2018). Recent work has suggested that learning from a parent-child math interaction may depend not only on the parents’ math input, but also on children’s own abilities to take in that input (authors, under review). Specifically, parental math talk is differentially related to preschool-aged children’s math achievement, depending on children’s executive functioning. High levels of parent math talk are not uniformly related to children’s math performance but depend on children’s own general cognitive abilities, such that children with better executive functioning benefit more from parents’ high math talk.
Here, we examined whether children’s responsiveness to their parents’ explicit attempts at engaging them in math-related conversations predict children’s math performance. Specifically, parental math elicitations via prompts and questions about math were measured in 55 children (Mage = 3.9 years; SD = 0.8 months) and one of their parents. In a ten-minute naturalistic free play interaction, we transcribed and tallied the overall number of parents’ elicitations of both math and non-math concepts. We then coded the frequency with which children responded in a relevant way to these parent attempts to talk about math concepts, i.e., we identified the proportion of parental math elicitations that children answered appropriately even if the answer was not necessarily mathematically correct. We found that although parents’ number of math elicitations was not related to children’s math achievement on the Test of Early Mathematics Ability (TEMA-3; Ginsburg & Baroody, 2003), children’s frequency of responding relevantly to those parental math elicitations did relate to their math performance. Children who more frequently responded to their parents’ math elicitations with relevant responses answering the math prompts performed significantly better on the TEMA-3,  = .33, p = .021, even when controlling for the overall frequency of children’s relevant responses to non-math parent elicitations. This suggests parental math elicitations and attempts to draw children’s attention to math concepts may not be beneficial for all children, and instead may rely on children’s own ability to take in that input and respond appropriately. Future work should examine interventions to increase children’s attention and responsiveness to their parents, to identify whether this may increase how much they benefit from their parents’ math input.

Authors

• Alex M. Silver, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Caitlin Convery, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Thomas Marlin, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author