Talia Berkowitz. Exploring the relationship between parents’ math anxiety and home numeracy practices: A proposal to provide insight into effective ways to support parent-child math engagement
Achievement gaps in mathematics emerge prior to kindergarten and persist throughout school. The level of parents’ engagement around math with their children plays an important role in the development of children’s early number competencies prior to the beginning of formal schooling. However, not all parents have the confidence or the ability to adequately support their children’s mathematical development. Therefore, in the proposed study, we plan to explore how parents’ attitudes towards math, namely the anxiety they experience around doing math, and their socio-economic status may limit the quantity and quality of parent engagement around math. Using both survey and observational data, we plan to answer two main questions with this study: 1) Do parents differ in their math engagement with their children based on their levels of math anxiety, and 2) Does parents’ anxiety around math interact with their socio economic status in predicting variations in parent math input? An overarching goal of this study is to understand some of the barriers parents face in having meaningful math-related interactions with their children. This is a crucial first step towards the development of effective interventions targeted at improving parent-child engagement around mathematics.
Department of Psychology