The Home Numeracy Environment and Children’s Math Skills: The Moderating Role of Parents’ Math Anxiety

• In Event: Home Practices and Beyond: Looking at Media, Numeracy, Literacy, and Authentic Practices in Diverse Populations

Abstract

A growing body of research shows that both parents’ math anxiety (Soni & Kumari, 2017) and the home numeracy environment (HNE; Niklas, Cohrssen, & Tayler, 2016) are related to children’s mathematics performance. Yet, despite the findings from both areas, most of the work has developed separately. Few studies include both math anxiety and the HNE in the same models, and when they do, they are limited by the types of measures that are used or by the age of the sample. Specifically, most research has been conducted with older children (e.g., in elementary school) and not during preschool when processes in the home environment constitute a core component of children’s learning (Tamis-Lemonda & Rodriguez, 2008). It is likely that parents’ math anxiety influences the math activities in the home environment, and together, these components influence children's numeracy performance. However, this complex relationship has not yet been explored. Thus, the purpose of this study is to (1)Examine the joint association of the HNE and parents’ math anxiety with preschool children's concurrent math performance during preschool, as well as to (2)Evaluate whether the interaction between the HNE and parents’ math anxiety influences children’s concurrent mathematics. We hypothesized that there would be a positive relation between HNE and children’s numeracy achievement, and a negative association between parents’ math anxiety and children’s numeracy performance. We further hypothesized that the relation between HNE and children’s numeracy achievement would be conditional on parents’ math anxiety.

Participants were recruited from a large pre-kindergarten evaluation project. Children (n=122) completed direct assessments of academic achievement in the fall of their pre-kindergarten year, and the majority of parents (n=96) completed a survey about family characteristics and engagement during the same fall. Children range in age from 3.84 years to 5.27 years (M=4.73, SD=0.32) at the start of preschool, and 42% were girls. The sample was moderately racially and ethnically diverse; children were White (29%), Hispanic (17.5%), African American/Black (38.1%), Middle Eastern (0.8%), Multiracial (11.1%), other (1.6%).

We used a multiple linear regression model to analyze the relation of the HNE and parents’ math anxiety and its interaction on preschool children’s numeracy performance, controlling for the set of covariates. We found that the main associations of parents’ math anxiety and the HNE on children’s numeracy performance were not statistically significant. However, the results from the models with the interaction term between parents’ math anxiety and the HNE analysis show a negative and statistically significant interaction between parents’ math anxiety and the HNE on children’s numeracy performance (see Table 2.1: β=-0.22, SE=0.10, p=.024 [95% CI=-.42,-.03]). As shown in Figure 2.1, there is a positive association between HNE and children’s math performance when parents reported low levels of math anxiety. However, when parent’s math anxiety increased the association between HNE and children’s math performance turned to be negative. This result highlights a need to develop more tools to support parent-child math interaction especially when parents’ feel anxious about math.

Authors

• Jimena Cosso, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer Kristine Finders, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Duncan, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara Anne Schmitt, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• David James Purpura, Purdue University, West Lafayette
  Non-Presenting Author