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Abstract

Children’s math achievement is related to various factors, including foundational math skills, math attitudes, and parent math attitudes and behaviors. In this dissertation, I focus on children’s early math achievement and aim to improve our understanding of the math achievement-attitude relation, and the role of parent math attitudes and parent talk. In Study 1, findings suggest that by 1st grade, math anxiety negatively predicts math achievement, over and above foundational math skills, and is particularly detrimental for performance on math tasks at the cusp of children’s math skills. Thus, math anxiety may be particularly harmful in school settings, where children are continuously exposed to new math skills at the cusp of their learning levels. In Study 2, I focus on young children from low SES backgrounds, to improve our understanding of factors that might contribute to their low math achievement. Findings suggest that at the start of formal schooling, math achievement plays a role in the development of positive or negative math attitudes regardless of SES backgrounds. Further, parent math expectancy-value is an important predictor of child math achievement, regardless of SES backgrounds. In Study 3, using inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW), I found that parent number talk and other talk to toddlers causally affected math achievement in the preschool and elementary school years. Taken together, findings from this dissertation suggest that interventions focused on increasing parent math expectancy-value and parent talk, hold promise for increasing children’s math achievement and potentially for narrowing SES-related math achievement gaps.

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