3-151 - Parent and Early Educator Support of Children’s Early Mathematics Learning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children’s mathematics skills at school entry robustly predict later achievement (Duncan et al., 2007). Yet, our understanding of how these early differences in math skills develop is quite limited. This symposium is comprised of four complementary papers on this topic, and is framed by the rationale that parent and teacher support during early childhood are likely key to the development of math skills.

The first paper examines whether children’s focus on numerical and spatial concepts during play is correlated with parental efforts to direct attention toward these concepts, with results indicating moderate to strong correlations. The second paper examines implicit mathematics content in storybooks with a focus on the ways math content is associated with parents’ and early educators’ levels of language abstraction; these authors find that more sophisticated language and questioning from parents and teachers occurs when they notice numerical content in storybooks. The third paper examines the implications of parent anxiety about math for number talk with their preschool-aged children with evidence that parent math anxiety is unrelated to quantity of math talk but predicts lower quality of math talk. The fourth paper examines maternal support during block play at age 3, finding that support for spatial concept learning and planning are predictive of children’s math achievement when children are 4 ½ years.

Together, these papers examine how parents and early childhood teachers support math learning, multiple factors that contribute to individual differences in their support, and the types of support that best predict children’s later math achievement.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chairs

• Caitlin McPherran Lombardi, University of Connecticut

• Eric Dearing, Boston College

Individual Presentations

• Parents Direct Young Children to Attend to Numerical and Other Mathematical Features During Play - Presenting Author: Jenny Yun-Chen Chan, University of Minnesota; Nicole Prokes, University of Minnesota; Allison Bock, University of Minnesota; Michele Mazzocco, University of Minnsota

• The Relationship Between Level of Abstraction and Content in Storybook Reading - Presenting Author: Colleen Uscianowski, Columbia University; Ma. Victoria Almeda, Columbia University; Cassie Freeman, Columbia University; Herbert Ginsburg, Columbia University

• Parents’ Math Anxiety and Talk About Numbers during Pretend Play with Preschoolers - Presenting Author: Sarah H. Eason, University of Maryland; Ariadne Nelson, Boston College; Sarah Leonard, University of Chicago; Eric Dearing, Boston College; Susan Levine, University of Chicago

• Maternal Support of Young Children’s Planning and Spatial Concept Learning as Predictors of Later Math (and Reading) Achievement - Presenting Author: Caitlin McPherran Lombardi, University of Connecticut; Beth Casey, Boston College, School of Education; Dana Thomson, Boston College; Hoa Nha Nguyen, Boston College; Eric Dearing, Boston College