Abstract
This study focuses on parental reading and mathematical difficulties, the home literacy environment, and the home numeracy environment as well as their predictive role in Finnish children’s reading and mathematical development through Grades 1–9. We examined if parental reading and mathematical difficulties directly predict children’s academic performance and/or if they are mediated by the home learning environment. Mothers (n = 1590) and fathers (n = 1507) reported on their reading and mathematical difficulties as well as on the home environment (shared reading, teaching literacy, and numeracy) when their children were in kindergarten. Tests for reading fluency, reading comprehension, and arithmetic fluency were administered to children in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 9. Parental reading difficulties predicted children’s reading fluency, whereas parental mathematical difficulties predicted their reading comprehension and arithmetic fluency. Familial risk was associated with neither formal nor informal home environment factors, whereas maternal education had a significant relationship with both, with higher levels of education among mothers predicting less time spent on teaching activities and more time spent on shared reading. In addition, shared reading was significantly associated with the development of reading comprehension up to Grades 3 and 4, whereas other components of the home learning environment were not associated with any assessed skills. Our study highlights that taken together, familial risk, parental education, and the home learning environment form a complex pattern of associations with children’s mathematical and reading skills.
Highlights
Literacy and numeracy development are strongly interrelated, and the comorbidity of reading and mathematical difficulties is frequent (e.g., Purpura et al, 2011; Davidse et al, 2014; Purpura and Ganley, 2014; Korpipää, 2020)
The inclusion of familial risk (FR) and parental education in our study enables us to investigate if the possible correlation between home literacy environment (HLE) and home numeracy environment (HNE) can be further explained to help understand why some parents are more likely to support their children’s skill development (Napoli and Purpura, 2018)
One-way ANOVAs were conducted to compare the children with no FR (NFR), the children with one parent with difficulties (FR1), and the children with two parents with difficulties (FR2) (Tables 2, 3) and showed significant differences between the NFR group, FR1 group, and FR2 group for all the skills throughout Grades 1– 9 except arithmetic skills in Grade 7 as a function of parental reading difficulties
Summary
Literacy and numeracy development are strongly interrelated, and the comorbidity of reading and mathematical difficulties is frequent (e.g., Purpura et al, 2011; Davidse et al, 2014; Purpura and Ganley, 2014; Korpipää, 2020). Research has identified multiple shared and unique risk factors for reading and mathematical difficulties at the level of cognitive skills (Geary, 2011; Moll et al, 2016; Child et al, 2019) and brain processes (Raschle et al, 2011; Evans et al, 2015; Norton et al, 2015). FR acts via genes, but environmental factors have been shown to play an important role in the development of both reading (Evans and Shaw, 2008; Mol and Bus, 2011; Manolitsis et al, 2013) and mathematical skills (Dunst et al, 2017; Daucourt, 2019). Until recently, HLE and HNE have been separately studied, whereas their cross-domain and joint roles in children’s reading and mathematical development have received very little research attention
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