It takes two to tango: Dynamic and reciprocal caregiver-child conversations about numbers and math

• In Event: Tinkerer, Investigator, Learner, Scientist: Promoting children’s active role in informal STEM conversations

Abstract

Children’s early math experiences involve caregiver-child conversations about numbers (i.e., number talk (NT)) during everyday activities and play (e.g., Bachman et al., 2020). While these interactions are bidirectional, complex, and dynamic, much of the research on NT tends to capture caregivers’ and children’s exposure to and use of NT with the frequency of words or utterances spoken by individuals without accounting for interactional patterns, such as how NT at one time point affects subsequent talk and how NT is sequenced throughout the interaction. Capturing these dimensions of caregiver-child conversations about numbers may help elucidate an important mechanism driving children’s math learning. Thus, the current study aims to quantify important dimensions of these interactions, moving beyond frequency measures, to consider links with children’s early math skills.

Caregivers and 4-year-old children (n = 124, Mean child age = 4.40 years, SD = .30 years) were video recorded during free play with grocery toys (i.e., cash register, pretend food, and bills and coins) in their homes for about 8 minutes each. Their conversations were transcribed at the utterance level and coded for number talk. Cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) was applied to the transcription data to quantify the time course and co-visitation of individual and sequential NT utterances between speakers, revealing the extent to which dyads reciprocated each other’s NT (recurrence rate), the degree to which they engaged in “back and forth” number exchanges (determinism), the extent to which speakers engaged in consecutive NT (laminarity), and the lengths of these exchanges (mean diagonal line) and consecutive utterances (trapping time). Also, recurrence plots displaying how dyads’ NT recurred and evolved over time were generated for each interaction and descriptive analyses were employed to identify the content and function of dyads’ reciprocal NT. Last, we assessed children’s math, language, and executive functioning (EF) abilities.

Dyads varied widely in the extent to which they uttered and reciprocated each other’s NT. Descriptive analyses of a few selected recurrence plots reveal variability in the consistency and density of NT across time, even for dyads with relatively similar quantities of NT (Figure 1), as well as differences in the function of dyads’ reciprocation (e.g., to confirm, provide feedback, scaffold, etc.). Multiple regression analyses showed that recurrence rate significantly and positively related to children’s math skills above and beyond all other recurrence metrics, total caregiver and child NT, and child age (B = .34, SE = .17, p < .05). None of the other NT variables significantly related to children’s math ability, nor did any relate to children’s language or EF skills. Overall, these results suggest that the degree to which both speakers are actively engaged in conversations about number rather than children’s exposure to NT, may benefit children’s math abilities. Broadly speaking, these results provide evidence that domain-specific social processes such as the reciprocity of caregiver-child NT in naturalistic settings may support children’s early math. This suggests that it may be important to leverage dyads’ existing conversational practices surrounding numbers and math when designing and promoting informal learning activities.

Authors

• Shirley Duong, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Tehran Davis

• Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, University of Pittsburgh

• Heather J. Bachman, University of Pittsburgh

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh