Poster #22 - Does Inducing a Growth Mindset About Math Ability in Parents Enhance Children’s Math Adjustment?

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

A critical proportion of American children lack adequate math skills (National Science Board & National Science Foundation, 2019). School-based efforts have unfortunately not produced substantial improvements (National Science Board & National Science Foundation, 2019), leading many to consider parents as an untapped resource in children’s math learning (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2012). Current research suggests that parents’ involvement in children’s learning benefits children, particularly when it is autonomy supportive, affectively positive, and process oriented (for reviews, see Barger et al., 2018; Pomerantz et al., 2012). Thus, fostering parents’ involvement in children’s math learning may be key to improving children’s math achievement.
Parents’ beliefs are considered important drivers of their practices (e.g., Bornstein et al., 2018). When parents adopt growth mindsets (i.e., beliefs that ability is malleable) they engage in more constructive parenting (e.g., Moorman & Pomerantz, 2010). Thus, inducing parents to hold growth mindsets about math ability may effectively facilitate their constructive involvement in children’s math learning. Although interventions have targeted parents’ growth mindsets (e.g., Andersen & Nielsen, 2016), none have examined the math domain, where innate talent is often viewed as essential (e.g., Leslie et al., 2015). The current study evaluated the effects of a parent-directed, growth mindset intervention in the math domain with a longitudinal randomized-control design.
Parents (N = 615; 83% mothers; 33% with less than a college degree; 60% white, 22% Black) and their young elementary school children (M age = 7.17 years; 50% girls) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition. In the intervention condition, it was emphasized that children’s math ability can grow, particularly in working through difficult math. In the control condition, parents were told about Common Core math standards and the rationale behind them. Parents completed surveys assessing their math mindsets one week prior to the intervention (pre-intervention), immediately after receiving the intervention (post-intervention 1), three months after the intervention (post-intervention 2), and nine months later (post-intervention 3). Both growth mindsets and failure-is-constructive mindsets were assessed. Math parenting practices and children’s math adjustment (see Table 1) were also assessed at these times, except for immediately after the intervention.
Multilevel modeling with linear and quadratic time-of-assessment effects nested within dyads revealed that although all parents increasingly adopted growth and failure-is-constructive mindsets about math over the course of the study, the increase was significantly larger among parents in the intervention (vs. control; see Figure 1), ps < .01. The intervention, however, did not influence parents’ math practices or children’s math adjustment, although both generally became more constructive over time (see Table 1), ps < .01. In addition, there was no consistent moderation by child (e.g., math achievement) or parent (e.g., math anxiety) risk factors. Taken together, these findings indicate that although it is possible to induce parents to hold a growth mindset and see failure as constructive in the math domain over 18 months, this does not always translate into improved parenting practices or better math adjustment among children—at least it did not in this sample.

Authors

• Carolyn MacDonald, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Dajung Oh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Michael Barger, University of Georgia

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University

• Eva Pomerantz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign