Math Intervention Focused on Family Routines Improves Parental Math Talk

• In Event: Using Family Routines to Improve Children’s Literacy and Math Skills and Parenting Practices

Abstract

Family routines such as eating, grooming, and playing are important venues through which children can develop foundational math abilities before school entry (Kleemans et al., 2012; LeFevre et al., 2009). Many of these routines have inherent mathematical properties built into the materials and functioning, which help provide a rich opportunity for mathematical conversation (Zippert et al., 2019). In addition, these routines are already established in family life and valued by family members, which helps increase program uptake and sustainability (Eason et al., 2020). Parents may feel more comfortable and competent supporting children’s math skills in familiar contexts and perceive that such support does not require significant extra time or effort (Cannon & Ginsburg, 2008). Prior interventions promoting children’s math skills at home have leveraged routines such as playing (Ramani & Scalise, 2020; Zippert et al., 2019), reading (Berkowitz et al., 2015), and food routines such as cooking, grocery shopping, and eating together (Hanner et al., 2019; Leyva et al., 2018; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2012). However, very few have tailored the intervention to the specific routines in which families most frequently engage, even though there is wide variability in such frequency across families (Bachman et al., 2020). Here we test the feasibility of a new family intervention that tailors math support recommendations to families’ most frequent routines using a pre-post, experimental design. Participants were 76 mostly middle-income, White parents and their four-year-old children in the U.S. (M age = 53.32 months; 45% girls). Parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 38) or control (business-as-usual) condition (n = 38; see Table 1). Prior to condition assignment, parents completed a time diary interview in which they recounted the activities they did with their child the prior day, which was identified by the parent as a typical day. Based on these time-diary data, parents in the intervention condition received six videos (one per week) with strategies to support children’s math skills (counting/cardinality, set comparison, number identification, adding/subtracting, and patterning) in the family routines in which they most frequently engaged. At pre- and post-test (about 2 weeks after intervention), children’s math skills were assessed using the PENS subscales (Purpura & Lonigan, 2015) and a patterning task (Rittle-Johnson et al., 2020), dyads were videotaped playing and sharing a picture and their utterances were transcribed and coded for math content, and parents completed a home math activities questionnaire. OLS regressions controlling for pre-test scores and demographic variables yielded moderate-to-large impacts on parental math talk (d = 0.96) and home math practices (d = 0.47), but not on children’s math skills (d = 0.03; see Table 2). This study provides proof-of-concept that an intervention that tailors math-supports to the families’ most frequent routines is feasible and has the potential to increase specific parental behaviors that are known to influence children’s math development. Replication using a larger and more diverse sample and incorporating follow-up post-test data is needed to further evaluate the efficacy of this intervention.

Authors

• Rebecca McGregor, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Diana Leyva, University of Pittsburgh

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh