Poster #10 - Examining parent-child interactions during math explicit and implicit activities

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Young children’s development of numeracy skills benefits from early numeracy environments, especially from the home context. Parent number talk at home supports young children’s learning of numeracy skills but varies in types of activities. Some of the activities, such as play (Casey et al., 2018) and shared readings of number books (Zippert & Rittle-Johnson., 2020), are considered as math explicit activities, because math content (e.g., numerals) is outstanding. Whereas, other activities, such as routine activities (e.g., mealtime) and shared readings of a textless book, are considered as math implicit activities, because math content is not always obvious. Children’s early math learning experience comprises both math explicit and implicit activities, where their math skills get strengthened (Chaparro-Moreno et al., 2017). Studies examining the differences in parent-child interactions during math explicit and implicit activities, however, are scarce. Understanding the differences in parent-child interaction during the two activities will help design effective interventions. The current exploratory study examined the differences in parents’ number talks during a math explicit and implicit activity. We hypothesized that parents’ number talks significantly differ during a math explicit and implicit activity.

Participants were 119 parent-child dyads with children ages 3-to-5 years old. Parent-child interactions were recorded for two 10-minute activities: math-explicit numeracy activity and math-implicit shared reading of a textless book. Parents’ number talks were double-coded (adapted from Ramani et al., 2015), and yield a satisfactory agreement. During the math-explicit numeracy activity, parents produced an average of 87.55 utterances (SD = 48.49, ranging from 15 to 294) and an average of 41.63 number talk utterances (SD = 27.14, ranging from 5 to 205). Thus, on average, parents’ percentage of number talk during the math-explicit numeracy activity was 49.92% (SD = 19.81%, ranging from 5.43% to 95.79%). During the math-implicit shared book reading activity, parents produced an average of 74.45 utterances (SD = 37.91, ranging from 16 to 222) and an average of 13.37 number talk utterances (SD = 10.32, ranging from 0 to 47). Parents’ average percentage of number talk during the shared book reading activity was 18.38% (SD = 12.00%, ranging from 0.00% to 49.02%). The percentage of parents’ number talk during the two activities was significantly different (t [118] = 14.13, p = .000, Cohen’s d = 0.243), indicating that parents produced more math-related utterances during the numeracy activity, which math content is explicit than in the shared reading of a textless book.

We also found that those parents who talked more in the math-explicit numeracy activity, were also talking more in shared book reading in general (r=.310, p=.000). However, the percentage of parents’ number talk during the two activities were not correlated (r= -.119, p=.199). The result indicated that when math content is implicit, parents might not be sensitive to such content, and thus the likelihood of talking about numeracy related content to their child may be low. Future interventions must consider ways to support parents’ awareness of implicit math content in daily life in order to support children’s learning.

Authors

• Stephanie Alejandra Gomez
  Presenting Author

• Sen Wang, Florida State Univeristy

• Keting Chen, California State University - San Bernardino