Disassociating the relation between parents’ math anxiety and children’s math achievement: Long-term effects of a math app intervention.

Abstract

Although parents' fears and worries about math-termed math anxiety-are negatively associated with their children's math achievement in early elementary school, access to an educational math app that 1 st -grade children and parents use together can ameliorate this relation. Here we show that children of higher-math-anxious parents learn less math during 1st-3rd grades, but this is not the case when families are given a math app (even after app use markedly decreases). Reducing the link between parents' math anxiety and their positive attitudes about math for their children helped to explain the sustained benefit of the math app. These findings indicate that interventions involving parents and children together can have powerful lasting effects on children's academic achievement and suggest that changes in parents' expectations for their children's potential for success in math, and the value they place on this success, play a role in these sustained effects.

The home math environment and math achievement: A meta-analysis.

“…After rejecting articles based on titles that indicated that the association of interest was not included in the study (i.e., the article measured the home learning environment but did not include an achievement measure, the article was a review or a qualitative study, or the article measured children’s reading instead of math achievement), the most common reason for article exclusion was the use of a home environment and/or achievement measure that was not math-specific. Notably, a few recent prominent articles investigating the HME-achievement link through parent math anxiety, math applications at home, and/or parent homework help were excluded because of not reporting correlations for parent math anxiety and/or parent homework help with children’s math achievement (Berkowitz et al, 2015; Gunderson et al, 2018; Maloney et al, 2015; Schaeffer et al, 2018).…”

Measures Matter: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Educational Apps on Preschool to Grade 3 Children’s Literacy and Math Skills

“…To date, there is mixed evidence that educational apps improve student outcomes. Although there is some evidence that educational apps can improve early-grade math skills (Schaeffer et al, 2018), a narrative review of apps for preschool-aged children concluded that “more large-scaled randomized trials of apps are needed” (Griffith et al, 2020, p. 11). One way to synthesize the existing research with timely and rigorous evidence is to use meta-analytic methods to combine results from small- to medium-sized experiments and quasi experiments and to explore potential sources of treatment effect heterogeneity.…”

Achievement emotions and academic achievement: Reciprocal relations and the moderating influence of academic buoyancy.

“…Typically interventions have focused on test anxiety (von der Embse, Barterian, & Segool, 2013), school phobia, and school refusal (Lauchlan, 2003). There are fewer interventions for classroom or learning anxiety, and these are focused on specific forms of anxiety such as math anxiety (Schaeffer, Rozek, Berkowitz, Levine, & Beilock, 2018) and statistics anxiety (Smith & Capuzzi, 2019). Math anxiety interventions are germane to the present study with the substantive focus on classroom emotions in mathematics (cognate, although not identical with math anxiety).…”