Search

• Parental knowledge about early math development predicted their math beliefs which predicted their math support. • Parental knowledge about early math development uniquely predicted their patterning but not numeracy support. • Parental educational attainment and employment status, but not their income, predicted their support. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluated the effect of two light-touch home math environment (HME) interventions on parental math support, knowledge about early math development, and expectations for their child's math development, with attention to both numeracy and repeating patterns. Participants were 107 parents (74% college educated, 53% high income, 54% White, 36% Black) and their four-year-old children. Parents completed surveys and a parent-child play session before and after an intervention during which they received information about numeracy (n = 54) or patterning (n = 53) development via a brief discussion and text messaging. The interventions increased some aspects of parental math support, particularly the frequency of observed support of patterning skills. However, potentially due to ceiling effects prior to the interventions, they did not substantially impact parental knowledge about nor expectations for early math development. We discuss these results with attention to the promise of light-touch HME interventions that utilize text messaging. • Parents rated the light-touch, text messaging-based, early math interventions as helpful and relevant to their child. • The patterning intervention increased parents' overall and advanced support of patterning skills (medium effect sizes). • The numeracy intervention increased parents' advanced numeracy support and knowledge of numeracy development (small effects). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]