Education Week - May 10, 2017 - 9

Survey finds parents
rank subject lower
By Sarah D. Sparks
In the past 20 years, parents have
taken to heart public-awareness campaigns urging them to read to their
children every night. But math initiatives have not gained as much traction-even as emerging evidence suggests early math may be one of the
most critical school-readiness skills.
A survey last month of more than
2,500 parents found that they generally rank math and science as lower
in importance and relevance to their
children's lives than reading. Moreover, 38 percent of parents, including
half the fathers surveyed, agreed
with the statement "Skills in math
are mostly useful for those that have
careers related to math, so average
Americans do not have much need
for math skills," according to the
survey by the Overdeck and Simons
foundations.
"Nobody is proud to say, 'I can
barely read,' but plenty of parents
are proud to stand up and say, 'I
can barely do math, I didn't grow up
doing well in math, and my kid's not
doing well in math; that's just the
way it is,' " said Mike Steele, a math
education professor at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was not
associated with the study.
"We need to shift the mindset that
math is just some innate ability that
has a genetic component, and you are
either a math person or you are not,
to a conception that everybody can do
math with effort and support ... and
to understand why that's important."

Early Math Critical
In fact, some evidence suggests
early-math skills can be crucial to
students' overall school careers. In a
2007 study, Greg Duncan, an economist and education professor at the
University of California, Irvine, and
his colleagues used six large-scale
longitudinal studies of students to

look at what most affected a student's long-term school outcomes.
They found that a child's math
ability at the start of kindergarten
was the best predictor of his or her
academic performance in 8th grade,
even more than early-reading scores,
attention, or social-emotional development. That held true regardless of
gender, race, or family income.
Analyses of federal longitudinal
data released last year showed that
school-readiness gaps between poor
and wealthier kindergartners have
narrowed by 16 percent in the last 20
years, partly credited to low-income
parents reading to their preschoolage children more frequently. However, math-readiness gaps shrank
by only 10 percent during that time,
though it's difficult to tell whether
parents engaged their children more
in math during that time. The federal data, which asked specific questions about the number of books in a
child's home and the literacy activities parents did with their children,
did not have explicit questions about
math activities.
Moreover, the same socioeconomic
gaps seen in early literacy show up
in math, too. For example, while lowincome preschoolers are exposed to
fewer words in general than their
wealthier peers, there are also particular gaps in exposure to words
related to math, such as numbers
or size and shape comparisons, according to a forthcoming study in
the journal Zero to Three. Parents
were recorded for 7½ hours over 16
months, when their children were 1
to about 2½ years old, and researchers led by Susan Levine, an education professor at the University of
Chicago, found wide differences in
how often parents used number
words and spatial descriptions, like
shape or size.
"We find there's a 60-fold difference in the amount of number talk,"
Levine said. "At the low end, at 1 to
3 years of age, the kids are getting
about 1,500 number words from their
parents; at the high end, they are
getting more than 100,000." The gap
was similar for spatial words.

PARENTS OVERALL AGREE
ON VALUE OF MATH
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Skills
in math are mostly useful for those with careers related to
math, so average Americans do not have much need for
math skills.

21%

19
3

Strongly
agree

Somewhat
agree

SOURCE: Simons Foundation

Somewhat
disagree

Strongly
disagree

Don't
know / no
opinion

Brian Widdis for Education Week

Do Parents See Math as 'Less Useful' Than Reading?

Nicole Lawson, left, and daughter Qui'shia Floyd attend an after-school common-core math class at Old Orchard
Elementary School in Toledo, Ohio, in 2014. The class teaches parents how to use common-core "thinking math"
to help their children with homework that's likely different from the math they learned in school.

In addition, children exposed to
more math-related words as toddlers had better number and spatial sense by the time they were
preschool age, Levine found. Although there were socioeconomic
gaps in math exposure, it wasn't
uniform; there were also gaps for
parents who were more or less anxious about math.
Parents do generally teach their
toddlers to count to 10 around the
same time they teach the ABCs,
but don't go beyond that to skills
that have been found to be predictive of long-term math achievement, such as identifying the size
of a small group by sight, according to Laura Overdeck, a board
member of the Overdeck Family Foundation and the creator of
Bedtime Math, a free app-based
program that provides short math
puzzles for parents to do with children of different ages. Parents
"don't pick [math activities] up
again until the child is in school,
and then math is homework and
quizzes and tests," she said.
Last month, Jon Schultz, a middle
school special education teacher in
Queen Anne's County public schools
in Maryland, and his wife, Erin Anderson, a sociologist at Washington
College in Chestertown, Md., were
taking their daughters to the National Math Festival in Washington.
They described one of them, Grace, 7,
as a "math lover" who just competed
in the St. Jude Math-a-thon, a competition for children.
Grace and her 5-year-old sister,
Claire, have both been in a comprehensive preschool since they were 2
and have been learning math there-
"and from 'Sesame Street' the year before that," Anderson said. But generally, they said parents have been told
more about literacy activities to do at
home than about math activities.
"I think it's much easier to tell parents, 'Here, read a book,' than 'Go do
math problems,' " Schultz said.
Anderson added, "I think math is
something that's always kind of par-

celed out-and I was totally guilty of
this as a kid-that you're either good
at math or not good at math. Reading is for everybody, but we kind of
divide up who are the people who are
good at math," Anderson said.
Overdeck agreed.
"One reason reading efforts have
been more successful so far, I think,
is parents are more willing to try
reading; they have less anxiety.
Math is different because there's a
whole culture of math anxiety in this
country, so in many cases, schools
are asking parents to take a subject
they hated and do it with their children," Overdeck said.
What's more, Overdeck said,
changes in the way schools teach
math have been more visible to parents than the changes made to the
way reading is taught, making them
feel less confident that they can help
their children with even elementarylevel homework.
"You look at the homework and say,
'Whoa, I didn't do it that way,' " said
Johanna Olexy. Math is the favorite
subject of her 3rd grade son, Jackson.
"With reading, it's easy to say, 'I can
read, I can pick a book and sit with
my kids.' But there's always a certain point with math that I go, 'Wait
a minute, what is this again?' "

Solving Generational Math Fear
Increasing parent involvement in
early math means changing what
parents think math means, said Rebecca Parlakian, the senior director
of programs at Zero to Three, a nonprofit early education advocacy group.
"While it seems really clear what
to do for early literacy-read to your
child, talk, think out loud, say stories
and rhymes-we don't always make it
clear what it looks like to do math with
your kids every day," she said. "What
we hear from the general public is
these subjects are supercomplex and
really for later in school experiences. ...
It's assumed math is something that's
taught in elementary school."
It can be helpful, she said, if pre-

school and early-elementary teachers explain to parents how the art
projects, board games, or puzzles
children do in class relate to math
skills. For preschoolers, simply playing a board game with dice or sorting toys by different rules builds
early math understanding. "It may
not look like what parents think
math looks like in their heads, but
that's part of the learning process,"
Parlakian said.
The University of Wisconsin's
Steele, who is expecting his first
child, said he would start introducing
math long before school, asking the
child at age 2 or 3 about the patterns
he or she sees all around.
"Math is all about quantifying
and describing the world. I might
ask, 'How many windows do you
think there are in this building?'
Count a few, look for patterns, figure
out how you would decide how many
there are," Steele said. "I could look
at a bookshelf and ask how many of
those smaller books do you think
would fit on that shelf, compared
to the larger books below it? Really
straightforward things like that get
kids thinking about how they see
mathematics in everything around
them and get them into the habit
of looking at the world through a
mathematical lens."
The Overdeck and Simons foundations are building up an inventory
of math- and science-engagement
projects crafted by teachers, which
they and parents can do with students outside the classroom. So far,
more than 1,000 projects have been
submitted nationwide, and more
than 700 have been funded. Eventually, the foundations hope to distribute materials or lesson plans from
teachers' proposals to other schools
and parents.
Coverage of early-math education is
supported in part by a grant from the
CME Group Foundation, at www.
cmegroupfoundation.org. Education
Week retains sole editorial control over
the content of this coverage.

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Education Week - May 10, 2017

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