Poster #10 - Spontaneous mathematical information-seeking supports children’s math development

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

Math abilities are related to outcomes including better health, greater chance of full-time employment, and higher income (Agarwal & Mazumder, 2013; Currie & Thomas, 2001; Reyna & Brainerd, 2007), with individual differences in math present as early as the beginning of kindergarten (Jordan et al., 2006). Previous work has found that parental support of children's early math learning can occur through encouraging conversations about math (Levine et al., 2010; Elliott et al., 2017). In particular, parents who use more frequent math talk have children with stronger math skills. However, recent work suggests that some children may benefit more from parental math talk than others (Silver et al., 2021). Specifically, children with high inhibitory control who hear frequent math talk from their parents outperform their peers with lower inhibitory control who hear frequent math talk, as well as children who hear infrequent math talk regardless of their inhibitory control. This suggests that child factors should be considered when examining the benefits of parent-child math discussions.

To date, no work has looked at how children spontaneously discuss math concepts without parental prompting, which may be a key information-seeking technique that helps children shape their own math learning. Here, we examined children's math elicitations (questions and prompts used to evoke a math response) during natural free play in both lab and home settings in 119 parent-child dyads (62 boys; M age=3.9yrs). We focused on cases where parents were not previously discussing math, but children elicited math content relevant to the ongoing conversation from their parents. Children who used more spontaneous math elicitations had larger growth in math skills over 6 months, even when controlling for their overall elicitations and baseline math performance, β=0.35, p=.001 (Figure 1), suggesting that children who take what their parents are discussing and make it math-related may promote their own math learning.

Given the robust association between children’s spontaneous math elicitations and their math performance, we were interested to explore predictors of children’s use of spontaneous math elicitations. To this end, we have begun coding children’s spontaneous focusing on number (SFON) tendency in this sample (preliminary data from n=66 children, 33 boys). Children’s SFON measures their unprompted attention to numerical information in the environment and was assessed via imitation tasks where children were instructed to imitate a series of actions performed by the experimenter without specifically mentioning what part of the action to focus on (Hannula & Lehtinen, 2005). We predicted that children with higher SFON in these tasks would be more likely to attend to mathematical information during parent-child interactions and seek out additional math discussion from their parents. While additional coding for the full sample is underway, we find that children’s SFON predicts their later use of spontaneous math elicitations, β=.17, p=.044 (Figure 2), even when controlling for children’s overall elicitations and prior math skills. Altogether, this work stresses the importance of considering how children may directly shape the home environment and their opportunities to learn in addition to thinking about parents' influences on children's math learning.

Authors

• Kalina M. McNeil, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Alex M. Silver, University of Pittsburgh

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh