What predicts a child's math achievement by the time he or she graduates from elementary school? Yes, the obvious candidates such as the quality of one's school and teachers play a big role. But, that's not all. As it happens, what a kid knows by the time he or she enters preschool is also a strong predictor of later success. Interestingly, there are striking differences in preschoolers' knowledge of math - some kids know a lot about number and some very little. Now, new research suggests that one major determinant of these differences among kids is how much their parents talk about number.
In a paper published in the most recent issue of Developmental Psychology, Susan Levine and her colleagues at the University of Chicago report the results of a study in which they made home visits and observed interactions between kids, aged 14 to 30 months, and their parents. The research team made a total of five visits to each household over the course of a year and a half. The visits lasted for about 90 minutes each. During the visits, the researchers recorded how often the parents used number words when interacting with their children while they did everyday activities like reading a book or putting together a puzzle.
Interestingly, there were big differences in the amount of number talk parents used during the research team's visit. Some parents uttered several hundred number words in a 90 minute period. For example, while reading a book, one parent said, "Let's count the balloons. Ready? One, two, three, four, five." Others mentioned number less than five times in the same 90 minute time period. Susan Levine estimates that these differences could mean that some kids hear only about 30 number words a week from their primary caregiver while others hear upwards of 1,800 words.
What the researchers found was that the amount of number talk uttered by parents early on predicted their youngster's grasp of important number concepts at 46 months. The more number talk parent's used with their kids, the better their kids were at determining, for example, when presented with a set of four squares and a set of five squares on a sheet of paper, which set contained "five." This was true even when the researchers took into account the income-level of the homes the kids came from, which is known to relate to school readiness and academic achievement. Parent number talk, over and above any differences in family income level, predicts kids' math proficiency when they get to preschool. And, importantly, it's not just the overall talkativeness of the parents, but taking about number specifically that does the trick.
Of course, it's possible that rather than parent number talk influencing what kids know, parents who talk more about number may just have children who are more interested in this topic or who are better at understanding number concepts to begin with. However, other work in which the amount of number talk kids receive is actually varied randomly from one child to another suggests that it's the parent's speaking driving kids number knowledge, not the other way around.
What this work suggests is that, even before kids enter formal schooling, there is something simple parents can do to help along their children's math achievement. Simply incorporating number into daily life can do a world of good in terms of how students grasp these concepts by the time they enter school. So, start talking about number early and do it often.
For more on the development of academic skills and insight into how performance goes awry in school, check out my new book Choke.
Follow me on Twitter!
____
Levine, S. C. et al. (2010). What Counts in the Development of Young Children's Number Knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 46, 1309-1319.
