Chinese Parents’ Support of Preschoolers’ Mathematical Development

• In Event: Non-U.S., Majority World parenting

Abstract

Chinese children’s advantage in math compared to their Western peers is evident during the preschool years (e.g., Aunio et al., 2008). Although research has documented the critical role played by the early home environment in children’s mathematical development (Levine et al., 2019), little is known about how Chinese parents support development in this domain. The present study fills this gap by examining a sample of 90 families of preschoolers from Nanjing, China (46 girls; Mage = 4 years and 11 months). Specifically, we investigated parental support—as measured by parent-child engagement in home math activities and number-specific language (i.e., number talk)—and its relation to child outcomes. These parental support measures were considered because prior research conducted in Western contexts has shown their positive impacts on children’s early math skills (e.g., LeFevre et al., 2009; Levine et al., 2010).

A native Mandarin-speaking researcher conducted family visits at participants’ home or at an education center, each lasting about 90 minutes. During the visit, the parent-child dyad was first recorded having a snack for 10 minutes and was asked to interact as they would normally do at home. We used this 10-minute snack time to gather measures of number talk use during interaction. Next, there was a semi-structured play interaction (not reported here). Then, the parent filled out a survey while the researcher invited the child to work on a series of computer-based tasks designed to assess their numeracy skills and cognitive abilities.

Recordings of parent-child interaction during the snack time were transcribed verbatim at the utterance level in the CHAT format of the Child Language Exchange System (MacWhinney & Snow, 1990). Every utterance in each transcript was coded into specific categories of number talk (e.g., counting, cardinality). Each category of number talk was further classified based on three contextual characteristics (i.e, present, non-present, abstract) (see Figure 1 for the average distribution of different categories and context). For further analysis, the quantity of number talk was generated by computing the proportion of total utterances that involved number talk utterances. Additionally, we expanded prior research by creating a diversity measure of number talk—the total amount of any unique combinations of number talk categories and context. Data on parent-child engagement in home math activities (28 items) were collected via the survey. We performed a principal component analysis for data reduction purpose. Three principal components (i.e., formal numeracy activities, informal numeracy activities, and general STEM activities) were generated and used in further analysis.

Findings indicate wide variability in these measures and that this variability is related to child outcomes (see Table 1). On average, controlling for potential confounding variables, the frequency of parent-child engagement in formal numeracy activities and informal numeracy activities respectively predicted children’s knowledge of cardinality (𝛃 = .03, p < .05) and arithmetic skills (𝛃 = .06, p < .05). Diversity of parent number talk predicted children’s number magnitude knowledge (𝛃 = 3.22, p < .01). Findings have implications for constructing cultural knowledge of mathematical development in the early home context.

Group Authors

N/A

Authors

• Qianru Tiffany Yang, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Jon Star, Harvard University

• Paul Harris, Harvard University

• Meredith L. Rowe, Harvard University