"Parent Scaffolding: Long Term Impacts on Children's Cognitive and Mathematical Skills"
Assistant Professor Lindsey Richland participated in the Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and Fellows Retreat for NAEd/ Spencer Postdoctoral Fellows.
The meeting, held at the Keck Center of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., was an opportunity for fellows to solicit feedback on their funded projects and for early career (pre-tenure) professional development. The Fellows Retreat consists of large and small group discussions with NAEd members and experts in the field, as well as speaker panels of NAEd members, funding institutions, and federal education policy makers.
DoE Distinguished Professor Greg Duncan served as one of the faculty mentors for the Fellows Retreat.
Project Summary
Lindsey Richland, University of
California, Irvine
Project Title: "Parental Scaffolding: Long Term
Impacts on Children's Cognitive and Mathematical Skills"
Parents and teachers contribute in different, important ways to children's development of academically key thinking and learning skills. While much research has focused on identifying high quality classroom pedagogies, much less is known about the parental contribution to children's reasoning. With relevance to mathematics education in particular, little is known about how parents scaffold children's problem solving, how their practices are related to children's long-term development of analytical and problem-solving skills, and whether their practices are related to the achievement gap. This project examines these questions using longitudinal, repeated-measures data from the NICHD Study of Early Care and Youth Development, a prospective study of 1364 children and families from birth through sixth grade. The project assesses mothers and fathers' home scaffolding practices while helping their child solve complex problems at five time periods from when the child is 36 months to fifth grade. Structural equation models (SEM) will then test the longitudinal association between parental scaffolding and children's math attainment both directly and through the child's cognitive skills. Ethnicity, income, and maternal education will be included in the model to determine whether the effects of parental scaffolding mediate known contributions of these variables to the math achievement gap.
