What do the parents of your students think of mathematics?
G'day, I am Dr Peter Price of Professor Pete's Classroom.
Welcome to episode 4 of the vlog.
This week on discussing a research study entitled: Intergenerational effects of parent's math
anxiety on children's math achievement and anxiety.
Bit of a mouthful the researchers I used as risky as participants children in grades 1
and 2 and their parents and they measured how anxious about mathematics the parents
were and the students levels of math achievement over school year and their own anxiety and
I found that the more anxious the parents were and the more they helped with their children's
homework the more that was passed on to the children so, the more likely the children
were to be anxious about mathematics and the less they learned over the school year.
So I think this is really important finding and something that every teacher can take
note of and can strategically think about how to help their children by are communicating
with parents about the math that they teach.
So basically, if parents were anxious that rubbed off on their own children, so the children
themselves became more anxious and the children learned less mathematics that actually have
a negative effect on how much mathematics they learned, of course they balanced it out
for other factors and so on.
So they deduced from the results that if the parents were anxious and they helped.
They reported that they help their children with the math frequently then they had an
effect, but if they didn't help their children with math very often and it didn't have the
effect.
Which is what you'd expect I guess if they weren't talking to their children about mathematics
I guess the opportunity to say negative things like all will I don't like math I find math
difficult, I don't like methods had to do, I wasn't any good at school, all those negative
messages.
If the parents not helping the chart with the homework then there are presumably fewer
opportunities to say those things.
So it makes you wonder whether you should say to some parents look if you're anxious
about math please don't help you know, back off don't say anything to your chart help
them with reading help them with other things but leave the math to me.
And maybe that is a strategy.
But I think probably a better strategy is to talk to parents about this result and explain
to them that if they act and speak negatively about mathematics in front of their children
that is likely to rub off the researchers have measured this and found that there is
an actual effect on the learning of children if their parents say they are no good at math
and are anxious about it and so on.
So to me this is really, it's fascinating but it's also really important because, it
points to a way that we can think about how to help children with mathematics with relation
to, with regards to how much help they get home or what sort of help they get home and
what math homework.
We send if you've got mathematics that is challenging for parents or is a new way of
teaching mathematics like for example, in the United States the common core is widely
criticized by parents and not well understood by a whole lot of people.
It may be that sending that sort of homework home to parents is not going to be a good
idea if the parents of those children are themselves already anxious about mathematics
so, quite fascinating.
The researchers did check to see whether the parents anxiety be about math had effects
on other learning and they said he didn't what it was they looked at reading specifically,
they said no effect on reading at all, and it only affect mathematics.
So another message just to finish, another result that we can another conclusion that
we can draw from this in my view is that if adults generally speaking negatively about
mathematics to children that will have the effect of making the children more anxious
about math themselves and so we should be careful to speak positively and be enthusiastic
and tell them how cool math is and I go out of my way to tell them how much I enjoy mathematics
and how much fun it is and just basically counter the negative messages that they might
otherwise be feeling and hearing and sign themselves about the subject.
So how do you deal with negativity about mathematics in your classroom?
Do you have any suggestions for other teachers?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, so do leave a comment below the video.
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