H0m3 is where Num3r4cy is! Parents’ contribution to their children’s basic numerical and mathematical skills

A growing body of literature has documented that home numeracy, defined as parent-child interactions with numerical content, is related to kindergarteners’ basic numerical and mathematical skills. However, several studies also reported a negative correlation or the absence of the relation between those two variables. The overarching goal of the this doctoral dissertation was to shed light on the concept of home numeracy and methods used to measure it, and its relationship with kindergartners’ performance on various basic numerical and mathematical tasks. A systematic review was conducted to present a detailed overview of the current knowledge on the concept of home numeracy and to attain explanations for contradicting findings. Five salient points were revealed that might moderate the relationship between home numeracy and children’s basic numerical and mathematical skills. Two of these points have been directly addressed. One of the points indicated that there were two common methods of home numeracy assessment (questionnaires and observations); however, these two have never been compared directly. Therefore, the relationship between these two methods and their relation to children’s calculation skills was investigated. It was found that home numeracy activities measured with a questionnaire were not related to home numeracy talk measured with observations. Furthermore, home numeracy activities assessed via questionnaires were positively related to kindergartners’ calculation skills, whereas the observed home numeracy talk was negatively related to calculation skills. A second point revealed from the systematic review was that the majority of the research examined children with comprehensive mathematical tests, which reveal a score by averaging the performance across several basic numerical and/or mathematical tasks. However, this composite score might mask specific relationships between home numeracy and the skills that were included in a comprehensive test. Therefore, the relationships between home numeracy and individual components of basic number processing skills (i.e., symbolic, non-symbolic and mapping skills) and calculation skills were investigated. Results showed that formal home numeracy activities (i.e., number practices) were associated with mapping skills (i.e., enumeration) and informal home numeracy activities (e.g., playing games) were associated with symbolic number line estimation and pictorial calculation skills in children. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates that assessment methods of both home numeracy and basic numerical and mathematical skills influence the relationship between them. These new findings have implications for researchers regarding the ways to operationalize home numeracy and basic numerical and mathematical skills, and for parents regarding the type of home numeracy interactions they could initiate with their children.