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How and Why are Socioeconomic Status and Young Children’s Math Skills Linked?

Fri, April 9, 2:45 to 4:15pm EDT (2:45 to 4:15pm EDT), Virtual

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Young children’s math skills are an important predictor of later academic achievement, which in turn drive adult employment and income. To the extent that socioeconomic status (SES) is related to early math skills, math gaps may perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic disadvantage. The goals of this symposium are to expand our understanding of young children’s math abilities across socioeconomically heterogeneous samples and to explore the mechanisms that give rise to associations between SES and math.

Paper 1 explores the relation between preschoolers’ cardinality knowledge and their use of gesture within a low-income sample. Results suggest that children’s working memory ability is an important factor to consider when examining the importance of gestures for children’s math skills. Paper 2 showed that the two most frequent indices of SES, parental education and family income, have differential relations to various aspects of 4-year-old children’s math abilities including basic number and spatial skills, non-symbolic number sense, and standardized math performance. To explain why children’s math skills vary by SES, Paper 3 explores whether parent number talk, a known predictor of children’s math, systematically varies by SES. Leveraging data from a number of previously published, international studies, they report a small, but positive relation between parents’ number talk and income and education respectively. Finally, Paper 4 suggests that stress exposure may explain SES differences in math. They showed that low math performance in low-SES 7- to 9-year-olds is related to greater activation in neural networks associated with mathematical thinking and greater levels of anxiety.

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