Does Parent Involvement and Neighborhood Quality Matter for African American Boys' Kindergarten Mathematics Achievement?

Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Home and Family Experiences and Young Children’s Early Numeracy Learning

“…Inasmuch as a number of investigators proposed and tested models where parent and family measures were hypothesized to influence children's early numeracy experiences, where numeracy experiences in turn were expected to be related to children's mathematics achievement (LeFevre et al 2010;Manolitsis et al 2013;Niklas and Schneider 2014;Skwarchuk et al 2014), the main effects results in Table 7.4 may be artifactual. Examination of the results in these modelling studies and the correlation matrices in other investigations (Baker 2014;Kleemans et al 2012Kleemans et al , 2013 showed, with only one exception (LeFevre et al 2010), that the parent and family variables were not even minimally related to the early numeracy experiences measures as postulated. This indicated that parent or family factors other than those used in the studies in all likelihood account for variations in young children's home numeracy experiences.…”

“…The fact that the numeracy experiences measures were related to variations in the children's mathematics performance some 18+ months later deserves special comment due to the finding that the results were found only for the six samples of children who were 36-65 months of age at the start of the studies (Baker 2014;Harris et al 2014;LeFevre et al 2002;Manolitsis et al 2013;Melhuish et al 2008). More specifically, the early numeracy experiences of the younger group of children were related to the children's later simple and basic mathematics skills.…”

“…The synthesis was limited to only quantitative studies where the effect sizes (Hedges 2008) between the child, parent, family, and numeracy experience measures and the child mathematics outcome measures could be calculated. Five studies were located that included children whose ages, on average, were 5 years or younger (Baker 2014;Harris et al 2014;LeFevre et al 2002;Manolitsis et al 2013;Melhuish et al 2008). Inasmuch as only five studies were located that met the inclusion criteria, the child age criterion was relaxed and studies of kindergarten age children were included in the meta-analysis if all of the other inclusion criteria were met.…”

“…Except for Baker (2014) and Harris et al (2014), the home and family experiences measures were all investigator-developed or adapted from measures developed by other researchers. Four of the investigators computed coefficient alpha to ascertain internal consistency of the item content.…”

“…Informal numeracy activities included everyday experiences that involved parent and child participation in activities involving arithmetic and mathematics elements (e.g., "How often do you and your child play number games?," "How often do you and your child play with a calculator?") where there was no intentional attempt to prompt or elicit predetermined instructional targets (Baker 2014;Kleemans et al 2013;Niklas and Schneider 2014). Formal and informal numeracy experiences differed primarily in terms of the questions posed to parents or researchers.…”