Home Numeracy Environment and Chilean’s Early Numeracy Skills at the Beginning and End of Pre-Kindergarten

• In Event: Parental Math Involvement and Children’s Math Skills: International Perspective

Abstract

The home math environment (HME) provides children with opportunities to learn math at home, and it involves parental math attitudes and expectations as well as the activities parents and children engage in (Eason et al., 2022). Recent systematic reviews (Eason et al., 2022; Mutaf-Yıldız et al., 2020) and meta-analysis (Daucourt et al., 2021) show that the HME is positively associated with children’s math achievement.

Despite evidence of the relations among several aspects of the HME and children’s numeracy skills, only a small percentage of the studies included are from South America (Eason et al., 2022). Moreover, the few studies with South American children (del Río et al., 2027, 2019; Susperreguy et al., 2020, 2021) do not explore the relations between the HME and specific early math skills included in different domains, such as numbering and relations (Purpura & Lonigan, 2013). Accordingly, this study aimed to investigate whether the HME is related to different early numeracy skills included in the domains of numbering and relations in pre-kindergarten children at both the beginning and end of the school year.

Participants were 203 typically-developing Chilean children attending pre-kindergarten (50% girls; average age 54.7 months, DS=4.8) and their parents. Parents were mainly mothers (92.2%), and their education ranged from less than 8 years to more than 16 years. Parents completed the Spanish version of the home numeracy environment questionnaire developed by Skwarchuk et al. (2014), which has been used in prior research with different Chilean samples (Susperreguy et al., 2020, 2021). Parents reported their math attitudes and expectations, as well as their home numeracy activities (i.e., formal mapping and operational, and informal). Children completed early numeracy tasks twice, at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of the school year. These measures included tasks in the domains of numbering (i.e., verbal counting and cardinality) and relations (i.e., ordinality and symbolic comparison).

We hypothesized that the HME will predict the different early number skills, both before children receive formal instruction (i.e., beginning of pre-kindergarten) and at the end of the school year. We explored the associations between the types of numeracy activities at home and children’s math performance in the domains of relations and numbering.

Multiple regression analyses indicated that parents’ educational attainment predicted children’s math performance in all tasks at both times. The HME predicted children’s early math skills, but only for some of the assessed tasks. The associations differed by the type of parental engagement. Specifically, informal numeracy activities were positively related to cardinality at Time 1, whereas operational activities predicted ordinality at Time 1 and verbal counting at T2. These results suggest that the HME relates to children’s early math skills in different ways, depending on the nature of the tasks and the experience children have had in school. Although some of the findings align with prior research, they also indicate differences in how the HME is related to children’s specific numeracy tasks in this group of pre-kindergarten Chilean children.

Authors

• Maria Ines Susperreguy, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  Presenting Author

• M. Constanza Ayala, Millennium Nucleus for the Study of the Development of Early Math Skills, MEMAT

• Maria Francisca Del Rio

• Christian Peake, Universidad Diego Portales,