The Home Numeracy Environment, Verbal Ability, and Executive Functioning: Describing Numeracy in Two Populations

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

The home numeracy environment (HNE), or the estimated time that families engage in activities which require the use and understanding of early number concepts, is a relatively understudied area of math research. Few studies have examined the unique contribution of formal and informal HNEs to numeracy scores among children in early elementary school (Kung et al., 2020; LeFevre et al., 2010). The present study is among the few to disentangle the formal from the informal HNE. Formal HNE refers to activities which require written symbolic understanding of number concepts, whereas the informal activities are those which require mental mapping and knowledge of numbers and computation. We also examined the prediction of numeracy from the formal and informal HNEs, verbal ability, and executive functioning (EF), which is known to be strongly related to math achievement.
The present study asks: 1) Does the HNE (formal and informal), verbal ability, and EF predict numeracy when controlling for participants’ age and SES? 2) Is the prediction of numeracy from the HNEs, verbal ability, and EF stronger for dual language learners (DLLs; i.e., children from homes that speak a language other than English), relative to monolingual English speakers? To address these research questions, 54 students in kindergarten and in first grade were tested with three measures of numeracy and a measure of verbal ability. Parents and teachers completed questionnaires to determine HNE and EF, respectively. A series of regression analyses (see Table 1) examined the prediction of numeracy scores from the formal and informal HNE, verbal ability, and EF. We also took a closer look at the strength of these associations between eight DLLs and eight monolinguals matched from within classroom on standardized numeracy, gender, and age.
The results indicated that verbal ability (R2= .28 to .30), EF (R2= .06 to .10), and the formal HNE (R2= .09 to .19), but not the informal HNE (R2=.01 to .07), were statistically significant predictors of numeracy scores when considered in isolation. Collectively, the formal HNE, verbal ability, and EF accounted for a moderate amount of variance in numeracy scores (R2= .40 to .44). With respect to comparisons between DLLs and monolinguals, the results indicated that formal HNE, verbal ability, and EF accounted for 73.4% to 84.4% of the variance in numeracy outcomes for DLLs. However, the group of predictors only accounted for 31.5% to 65.0% of the variance in the numeracy outcomes for monolinguals.
The present findings are consistent with prior research (e.g., Kung et al., 2020; LeFevre et al., 2010), indicating that the formal HNE, verbal ability, and EF are robust predictors of numeracy scores. In addition, the results of the subgroups analyses add to the emerging consensus on verbal ability being more important to math performance in DLLs than monolinguals (e.g., Foster et al., 2019). Teachers may benefit from communicating with parents regarding the numeracy activities that they are working on with students and school personnel could benefit from considering the extent to which tests of mathematics include verbally formatted test items.

Authors

• Paige Eplin, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Matthew E Foster, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara A Smith, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author