Parental early math support: The role of parental knowledge about early math development

Douglas, A.-A. & Rittle-Johnson, B. (2024). Parental early math support: The role of parental knowledge about early math development. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 66, 124–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2023.10.003 This study was the first part of the Heising Simons grant "Helping Parents..." and is sometimes referred to by the team as the "Family Math Survey (FMS) 2022". Parents vary substantially in the frequency and complexity of the math support that they provide to their children, and this variability is often related to their children's math knowledge. We hypothesized that parents' knowledge about the development of two critical early math topics would help explain some of this variability in their early math support. U.S. parents of 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 196 mothers and 148 fathers, 94% identified as the child's primary caregiver and 77% as White; 79% had at least a bachelor's degree) reported on their knowledge about the development of early numeracy and repeating patterning skills, numeracy and repeating patterning beliefs related to their children, numeracy and repeating patterning support, and education, income, and employment status via a survey. Parents’ knowledge about early repeating patterning development was positively related to all the measured child-specific repeating patterning beliefs and both were predictive of the frequency and complexity of their reported repeating patterning support. Their knowledge about early numeracy development was also positively related to most of their child-specific numeracy beliefs, but while their child-specific numeracy beliefs uniquely predicted their reported numeracy support, their knowledge did not. Parents’ knowledge about early numeracy and repeating patterning development was not consistently related to their education, income, nor employment status, but their education and employment status uniquely predicted their numeracy and repeating patterning support. Implications of these findings for research, theory, and parent-based interventions are discussed. The overall study was an online MTurk study with a parent home math environment survey that was collected in Spring 2022. Parents completed a questionnaire (see materials in files) and then randomly assigned to watch a short video about literacy or numeracy skills their young child could learn. They returned for a follow up questionnaire one week later. The full deidentified dataset is included in files, along with pilot 1 and pilot 2 datasets and a codebook which is incomplete, and never finished, but gives the labels of the variables and some information about the dataset as well as the info session 2021 piloting study (see linked project) which used similar labels. Syntax files are also available for each analysis run for the full dataset and the two pilots. It helped develop our survey including the parent knowledge of early math development measure, and is included as Study 5 in our 2023 article about developing and validating our knowledge measure (see linked project). Additionally, Msall et al. (2024) used this dataset to look at parent's beliefs and use for pedagogical approaches (see linked project)