Young children interpret number gestures differently than nonsymbolic sets.

Researchers have long been interested in the origins of humans' understanding of symbolic number, focusing primarily on how children learn the meanings of number words (e.g., "one", "two", etc.). However, recent evidence indicates that children learn the meanings of number gestures before learning number words. In the present set of experiments, we ask whether children's early knowledge of number gestures resembles their knowledge of nonsymbolic number. In four experiments, we show that preschool children (n = 139 in total; age M = 4.14 years, SD = 0.71, range = 2.75-6.20) do not view number gestures in the same the way that they view nonsymbolic representations of quantity (i.e., arrays of shapes), which opens the door for the possibility that young children view number gestures as symbolic, as adults and older children do. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/WtVziFN1yuI HIGHLIGHTS: Children were more accurate when enumerating briefly-presented number gestures than arrays of shapes, with a shallower decline in accuracy as quantities increased. We replicated this finding with arrays of shapes that were organized into neat, dice-like configurations (compared to the random configurations used in Experiment 1). The advantage in enumerating briefly-presented number gestures was evident before children had learned the cardinal principle. When gestures were digitally altered to pit handshape configuration against number of fingers extended, children overwhelmingly based their responses on handshape configuration.

The development of early numeracy in deaf and hard of hearing children acquiring spoken language.

Most deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are born to hearing parents and steered toward spoken rather than signed language, introducing a delay in language access. This study investigated the effects of this delay on number acquisition. DHH children (N = 44, meanage  = 58 months, 21F, >50% White) and typically-hearing (TH) children (N = 79, meanage  = 49 months, 51F, >50% White) were assessed on number and language in 2011-13. DHH children showed similar trajectories to TH children but delayed timing; a binary logistic regression showed that the odds of being a cardinal-principle (CP) knower were 17 times higher for TH children than DHH children, controlling for age (d = .69). Language fully mediated the association between deaf/hearing group and number knowledge, suggesting that language access sets the pace for number acquisition.

Parent math anxiety predicts early number talk.

Differences in children's math knowledge emerge as early as the start of kindergarten, and persist throughout schooling. Previous research implicates the importance of early parent number talk in the development of math competency. Yet we understand little about the factors that relate to variation in early parent number talk. The current study examined the relation of parent math anxiety and family socioeconomic status (SES) to parent number talk with children under the age of three (n = 36 dyads). For the first time, we show preliminary evidence that parent math anxiety (MA) predicts the amount of number talk children hear at home, beyond differences accounted for by SES. We also found a significant SES by parent MA interaction such that parent MA was predictive of higher-SES parents' number talk but not that of lower-SES parents. Furthermore, we found that these relations were specific to parents' cardinal number talk (but not counting), which has been shown to be particularly important in children's math development.

Elementary school teachers' math anxiety and students' math learning: A large-scale replication.

A solid foundation in math is important for children's long-term academic success. Many factors influence children's math learning-including the math content students are taught in school, the quality of their instruction, and the math attitudes of students' teachers. Using a large and diverse sample of first-grade students (n = 551), we conducted a large-scale replication of a previous study (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 2010, 1860; n = 117), which found that girls in classes with highly math anxious teachers learned less math during the school year, as compared to girls whose math teachers were less anxious about math. With a larger sample, we found a negative relation between teachers' math anxiety and students' math achievement for both girls and boys, even after accounting for teachers' math ability and children's beginning of year math knowledge, replicating and extending those previous results. Our findings strengthen the support for the hypothesis that teachers' math anxiety is one factor that undermines children's math learning and could push students off-track during their initial exposure to math in early elementary school.

Disassociating the relation between parents' math anxiety and children's math achievement: Long-term effects of a math app intervention.

Although parents' fears and worries about math-termed math anxiety-are negatively associated with their children's math achievement in early elementary school, access to an educational math app that 1st-grade children and parents use together can ameliorate this relation. Here we show that children of higher-math-anxious parents learn less math during 1st-3rd grades, but this is not the case when families are given a math app (even after app use markedly decreases). Reducing the link between parents' math anxiety and their positive attitudes about math for their children helped to explain the sustained benefit of the math app. These findings indicate that interventions involving parents and children together can have powerful lasting effects on children's academic achievement and suggest that changes in parents' expectations for their children's potential for success in math, and the value they place on this success, play a role in these sustained effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Response to Comment on "Math at home adds up to achievement in school".

Frank presents an alternative interpretation of our data, yet reports largely similar results to those in our original Report. A critical difference centers on how to interpret and test interaction effects. Frank finds no mistakes in our analyses. We stand by our original conclusions of meaningful effects of the Bedtime Learning Together (BLT) math app on children's math achievement.

Math at home adds up to achievement in school.

With a randomized field experiment of 587 first-graders, we tested an educational intervention designed to promote interactions between children and parents relating to math. We predicted that increasing math activities at home would increase children's math achievement at school. We tested this prediction by having children engage in math story time with their parents. The intervention, short numerical story problems delivered through an iPad app, significantly increased children's math achievement across the school year compared to a reading (control) group, especially for children whose parents are habitually anxious about math. Brief, high-quality parent-child interactions about math at home help break the intergenerational cycle of low math achievement.

Culturally-Driven Biases in Preschoolers' Spatial Search Strategies for Ordinal and Non-Ordinal Dimensions.

Culturally-driven spatial biases affect the way people interact with and think about the world. We examine the ways in which spatial presentation of stimuli affects learning and memory in preschool-aged children in the USA and Israel. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in both cultures were given a spatial search task in which they were asked to utilize verbal labels (letters of the alphabet) to match the hiding locations of two monkeys. The labels were taught to the children in either a left-to-right or right-to-left fashion to assess whether performance on this task is affected by directionality of labeling. English-speaking children performed better on the spatial search task when locations were labeled in a left-to-right fashion, while Hebrew-speaking children exhibited higher performance when labels were taught in a right-to-left fashion. In Experiment 2, English-speaking preschoolers were given a modified task in which the verbal label was a non-ordinal stimulus type (colors). These children showed no subsequent advantage on the task for spatial presentations which were culturally-consistent (left-to-right) relative to culturally-inconsistent (right-to-left). These findings support the hypothesis that culturally-consistent spatial layout improves learning and memory, and that this benefit is reduced or absent when information lacks ordinal properties.

The effect of friendly touch on delay-of-gratification in preschool children.

Physical touch has many documented benefits, but past research has paid little attention to the effects of touch on children's development. Here, we tested the effect of touch on children's compliance behaviour in a modified delay-of-gratification task. Forty children (M = 59 months) were randomly assigned to a touch or no touch group. Children in the intervention condition received a friendly touch on the back while being told that they should wait for permission to eat a candy. Results showed that children in the touch condition waited an average of two minutes longer to eat the candy than children in the no touch condition. This finding has implications for the potential of using touch to promote positive behaviours in children.