Parents’ Affect and Communication of Utility Value Linked to Children’s Probability Learning

• In Event: Looking Beyond Quantity: Using Surveys and Observations to Examine the Nature of Parents’ Mathematical Engagement

Abstract

Parents play an important role in fostering children’s motivation (Muenks et al., 2018). Parents do so via many specific behaviors that convey either motivating or demotivating messages to their children. For example, positive and negative feedback (Eccles, 1993; Heyman et al., 1992; Rakoczy et al., 2013), supporting or undermining their sense of agency (i.e., autonomy-support and control, Grolnick & Pomerantz, 2009), direct communication of the value of doing math (Hyde et al., 2017), and parents’ affect while working with children (Wu et al., 2022) have all been implicated in children’s math motivation.
However, much of the research on parents’ motivational behavior towards children tends to examine individual forms of parents’ motivational behavior or rely on self-reports, which may misconstrue the interdependence of the rich ways that parents interact with their children to support their math learning. We used observational coding to 1) quantitatively capture the frequency of parenting practices while playing math games with children that seem most likely to foster or undermine young children’s math motivation, 2) investigate what forms of parental practices tend to co-occur, and 3) examine the association between parental practices and children’s math learning.
Second- and third-grade children (N = 96, 50.0% girls) and their parents (89.5% mothers, 69.8% white) participated together in dice-rolling activities that parents were told could help their children learn probability. Videos of the fifteen-minute interactions were recorded. Trained research assistants coded for eight parent behaviors that theoretically promote children’s motivation (positive feedback, autonomy-support, intrinsic value comments, utility value comments, positive affect), or undermine it (negative feedback, controlling behaviors, negative affect). Disagreements were resolved by discussion or by a third trained researcher. Agreement on all behavior categories was substantial, κs > .72, ϒs > .89. Children took a probability knowledge test before and after interacting with parents.
The frequency of parents’ use of feedback, autonomy-support, and controlling behaviors was substantially greater than their use of value communication (see Table 1). All constructive behaviors were positively correlated with each other, and non-constructive behaviors were positively correlated with each other. However, there was no relationship between constructive behaviors and non-constructive behaviors, except positive and negative affect, which were positively correlated, suggesting some parents were more expressive in general. Constructive and nonconstructive behaviors were not mutually exclusive; the expression of one does not necessarily negate the expression of the other during informal math interactions.
Positive affect and utility value communication were positively correlated with children’s post-activity probability knowledge. Parents’ expression of positive affect predicted children’s post-activity performance (β = .20, p = .024), even when controlling for children prior math achievement and pre-activity probability knowledge. The relation between utility value communication and post-activity knowledge was reduced (β = .16, p = .073) when controlling for children’s prior math achievement (β = .16, p = .100) and pre-activity probability knowledge (β = .41, p < .001). These results suggest that in informal learning settings, talking about the personal relevance of math and heightening positive emotion may be useful tools to facilitate probability learning.

Authors

• Yuchen Song, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author

• Michael Barger, University of Georgia

• Emily Quinn Rosenzweig, University of Georgia

• Eva Pomerantz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign