Many studies have looked at how parents help young children learn math, but few have focused on specific types of verbal and non-verbal support, with little research on children ages 6–11. A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology aims to fill that gap by examining how specific parental scaffolding strategies affect children's math skills. Parental scaffolding includes the support and teaching methods that parents use to help children with learning tasks, allowing children to achieve tasks they cannot yet do independently. Studies show parental scaffolding positively influences children's math skills on specific tasks. However other studies using the same coding framework found no significant impact during game-based activities, suggesting that the current framework does not capture different parental strategies well.
In this study, researchers observed 78 children in grades 1–5 and their father or mother during two collaborative problem-solving tasks: map reading and block-building. The researchers looked at the relationship between student's math abilitiy in three areas -- fluency, computation, and problem solving -- and 12 dimensions of parental verbal and nonverbal scaffolding. Verbal scaffolding mainly included open-ended / closed-ended questions, multiple choice questions, observational leading questions, explanatory questions, and procedural questions. Nonverbal scaffolding mainly included manual helping, demonstrating, pointing, controlling, and onlooking.
Interestingly, they found that nonverbal strategies characterized as highly "directive" (such as pointing directly to where a piece should go) were negatively associated with children's math computation and problem-solving skills. The also found that as children get older, the benefits of specific verbal strategies changed. For example, open-ended questions positively impacted younger children's math fluency while procedural questions negatively impacted math fluency in older children.
StepUp Note
In NeuroNet Learning, our first advice to parents is “lead with a question.” This research shows that “asking questions” leads to better learning outcomes as parents are helping children. With StepUp to Learn exercises, children are expected to ask themselves the questions that will guide their learning: "what do I need to do, and when do I need to do it?" Being guided by questions helps children become independent learners.
Note by Nancy W Rowe, MS, CCC/A