Relations Between Parent Math Anxiety and Child Math Learning and the Role of Homework Help

• In Event: Identifying, Understanding, and Addressing Elementary Students' Negative STEM Emotions and Beliefs

Abstract

Objectives & Perspective
Parent’s math anxiety has been highlighted as a factor that serves as a social-environmental influence on children’s math anxiety and achievement (Maloney et al., 2015; Soni & Kumari, 2017). Furthermore, parent’s helping behaviors in math including helping with math homework, when paired with high levels of parent math anxiety, have previously been found to negatively impact children’s math achievement and anxiety (Maloney et al., 2015). It is critical to understand whether these findings replicate across different samples and settings so as best to inform how to support positive math attitudes and learning among parents and children. We tested whether parent math anxiety related to student math achievement and gains in math, predicting that we would find direct negative effects on both outcomes. We also tested whether we could replicate Maloney et al.’s (2015) finding that parent math anxiety was negatively related to student math learning only when the parent helped more with homework.

Methods
Participants were 2,953 kindergarten, first-, second-, and third-grade students and their parents, assessed during the 2018-2019 school year. Participants were varied in parent-reported race, with 129 children identified as Asian, 641 children identified as Black, 352 children identified as Hispanic, 1421 children identified as White, and 326 children identified as Multirace. Parents self-reported their math anxiety (SIMA; Núñez-Peña et al., 2014), answered a question about how much they help their children with their math homework (response on a 6-point Likert scale of Never to Every Day), and reported their child’s gender. Children completed a math achievement assessment in the fall (August/September) and in the spring (April/May) in their classrooms which is subsequently equated for grade level within testing occasion using item response theory (Schoen, Lavenia, Bauduin, & Farina, 2016). Correlations and then multiple regression analyses were used to answer the research questions.

Results
See Table 1 for correlations. Parent’s math anxiety and homework help were negatively correlated with student math achievement. In multiple regression analyses, both parent math anxiety and parent homework help were directly related to child spring math achievement (Model 2, Table 2). However, contrary to Maloney et al. (2015), who found that parent math anxiety was only negatively related to student math learning when parents helped with homework, we did not find evidence for this interaction effect (Model 3, Table 2).

Significance
As expected, parent’s math anxiety was negatively related to their children’s math performance and learning gains. However, homework help was negatively related to children’s performance and math learning gains regardless of level of parent mathematics anxiety. While this was unexpected, it could be that parents were providing more homework support because they were aware their child was struggling. We need more information to better understand why and how parents help their children with math homework, what these interactions look like, and additional parent and child characteristics/experiences that impact these interactions. Future work could implement experimental designs to fully understand the causal role of parent math anxiety and parent homework helping on children’s math outcomes.

Authors

• Sara A. Hart, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• Connie Barroso Garcia, Texas A&M University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elyssa A. Geer, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rachel A. Conlon, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Colleen M. Ganley, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author