Home numeracy activities and math achievement DISCUSSANT KERRY

Home numeracy activities and math achievement DISCUSSANT - KERRY LEE, THE EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Three Studies Venera Gashaj*, Qendresa Thaqi, Fred W. Mast, and Claudia M. Roebers Sam Sum Kwing Cheung & Ricci Wai-tsz Fong Numerical skills, home numeracy, and math anxiety influence mathematics achievement in second grade Roles of parents’ sense of perfectionism towards children’s learning & home numeracy activities in young children’s numeracy skills David Munez, Kerry Lee, Rebecca Bull Factor structure of HNE in Singapore: a multigroup analysis

Summary Study Aim Criterion Take-home Vanera Examined the relative explanatory power of basic numerical skills, math anxiety, home numeracy activities, and working memory at K predicted 2 nd Grade math achievement Standardised math test Home numeracy practices did not correlate with math achievement Sam Examined whether parents’ sense of perfectionism & frequency of home numeracy activities are associated with children’s numeracy skills Early math skills, somewhat similar to items in standardized math tests David

Vanera’s Study An effort to bring together variables examined separately in different studies and known to be associated with math achievement Home numeracy activities were measured by a self-rating instrument Math anxiety and basic numerical skills are both strong predictors of math achievement in 2 nd grade.

Observations With the mix of tasks and measures, one possibility is that some of them are more fundamental (working memory, home numeracy) and contribute to performances on the basic numeracy measures. In other words, basic numeracy may have fully mediated the explanatory power of the WM and IHN measures Why is it that informal home numeracy correlated with written computation and sequences but formal did not? Seems counter-intuitive. If what is often done in schools is seen as having more similarity with formal home numeracy activities, what do these findings say about the efficacy of formal numeracy instructions? Is it really that children learn best in an incidental or even playful manner? Or is it the way in which the formal instructions were carried out?

Sam’s study Bring together two areas that are seeming unrelated: perfectionism and home numeracy practices Found maladaptive perfectionism to be related to math skills (as did IQ and EF) Predictive power of perfectionism was independent of that of IQ and EF Home numeracy activity was not related to either kind of perfectionism nor math skills

Observations The children are quite young, to what extent are parents’ sense of perfectionism fully transmitted into their practice at this age? Surprising that maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism are correlated negatively

Munez’s study To what extent do Le. Fevre’s home numeracy measure share a similar factor structure in Singapore as it does elsewhere And also across children with different math profiles: normally achieving vs at risk Found differences in intercepts between normally achieving vs at risk groups Factor loading invariance held across groups

Overall remarks The null findings in the first two studies and findings of factor loading invariance cast further doubt on the predictive or explanatory utility of home numeracy measures There are limitations to the studies small