Minor Changes, Big Differences? Effects of Manipulating Play Materials on Parental Math Talk Abstract

• In Event: Talking About Numbers

Abstract

Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development (e.g., Braham et al., 2018; Eason & Ramani, 2020; Hanner et al., 2019; Shivaram et al., 2021; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2012). However, most of the previous interventions either explicitly direct parent’s attention to the opportunities for discussing math with children (e.g., Braham et al., 2018; Eason & Ramani, 2020) or involved training parents to support early math learning (e.g., Berkowitz et al., 2015; He et al., 2022; Hojnoski et al., 2014). While these types of interventions successfully increase parental math input, they are both time- and labor-intensive, which limits their generalizability and potential for scaling up. Thus, finding less intensive and more implicit ways of affecting parental math talk may have important practical implications.

The current study investigated how parental math talk is implicitly affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were manipulated along two dimensions: homogeneity (whether the toys were unique or included identical sets) and boundedness (whether the number of toys selected was restricted). Parent-child dyads (N=75, children aged 4-6) from Mainland China were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions – Unique Objects, Homogeneous Sets, and Bounded Range. In all conditions, dyads played games in two contexts that varied in the extent to which they were typically associated with numbers – party preparation and grocery shopping for 10 minutes each. The dyads were unaware of the true purpose of the study during the interaction. The interactions were videotaped, transcribed, and coded by independent observers not familiar with the research questions and hypotheses.

Parents produced, on average, 270 utterances, with substantial variability in loquacity: SD = 70.13; range: 126-469. There was no evidence that the manipulations had an effect on the overall amount of parent talk. 3 (Condition) x 2 (Context) ANCOVAs with parental education as a covariate were used for data analysis in SPSS. As expected, a greater amount and diversity of parental math talk (both p’s <.001) was observed in the grocery shopping than in the party preparation context (see Figure 1.). Importantly, the manipulation of features within context also affected the amount and nature of parental math talk. As hypothesized, homogeneity promoted the discussion of absolute magnitude talk (p<.001) whereas boundedness increased relative magnitude talk (p=.003) (see Figure 2.). The results provide support for the Cognitive Alignment Framework (Laski & Siegler, 2014), underscoring the importance of aligning the features of materials with targeted concepts. Besides, the findings demonstrated a possibility of affecting parental math talk in an informal play context, without extensive training or explicit instructions drawing parents’ attention to math in general or to specific math concepts.

Authors

• Linxi Lu, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Marina Vasilyeva

• Elida V Laski