Parental use of relational language in spatial activities with 3-year-olds: A cross-cultural perspective

• In Event: Cultural perspectives on relational learning: Variation in parental input and children’s performance

Abstract

Spatial learning requires learners to attend to relational structure, discern meaningful regularities, and make an inference in a new situation. Like other cognitive abilities, spatial reasoning is intertwined with one’s own cultural experiences. In the United States, first-generation immigrant children have become one of the fastest-growing populations in schools. They bring strengths for learning to classrooms in different ways depending on home experiences. Past research has shown the facilitative role of relational language in children’s STEM learning (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2005; Valle & Callanan, 2006); however, it remains unclear how the learning practice is carried out by parents from diverse cultural backgrounds. The present study, underscored by its goal of supporting widely underserved populations in the U.S., leverages everyday spatial play activities to connect children’s early spatial learning to their immediate environments and examine cultural variations and similarities in parental use of relational language.
Sixteen first-generation Chinese immigrant parents and 20 European-American parents in California, U.S. were given three sets of spatial and math activities (i.e., 3-D wooden puzzle, sorting game, and math-related book reading) to work with their 3-year-olds (Figure 1). Parent-child dyads were given one activity at a time in a fixed order and were instructed to interact as they normally would. The parent-child interaction was video recorded, transcribed, and coded afterward. A new coding scheme was developed to capture parental use of relational language in early childhood: (a) structure relation utterances that highlight spatial, size, or quantity relations of objects, (b) similarity comparison utterances that compare object similarities, (c) self-association utterances that relate the task at hand to the child’s prior knowledge and experiences, (d) surface labeling utterances that bring the child’s attention to the focal object and event.
The results showed Chinese immigrant parents used a significantly higher proportion of structure relation utterances that highlighted spatial and size relations than their European-American counterparts in the puzzle play (Chinese: M = .20, SD = .08; European-American: M = .14, SD = .06; t (34) = 2.69, p = .012), the sorting game (Chinese: M= .29, SD = .10; European-American: M= .14, SD=.10; t (34) = 4.65, p < .001) and book reading (Chinese: M = .07, SD = .03; European-American: M = .03, SD =.06; t (34) = 2.15, p = .04). Moreover, paired sample t-tests showed that the types of relational language used by the parents were task-dependent. Parents of both groups used a significantly higher proportion of self-association utterances in the book-reading task (M = .17, SD = .11) than in the puzzle (M = .02, SD = .02; t (35) = 8.04, p < .001) or sorting (M = .06, SD = .11; t (35) = 5.67, p < .001) tasks.
The present results provided evidence for cultural variations in linguistic experiences that contribute to young children’s spatial learning. The finding underscores the need for researchers, educators, and policymakers to understand the strengths and culturally relevant ways of learning by first-generation children in home settings.

Authors

• Yu Zhang, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Su-hua Wang, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Non-Presenting Author