Parents’ perspectives of home numeracy practices of primary school children

Background: Parent engagement in children’s home practices is crucial for their numeracy development. In research, qualitative studies have shown that parents’ engagement is complex and impacted by various aspects. Parent questionnaires have been used to explore a range of home practices but have not captured the complexities of engagement, thus resulting in some inconsistent findings. This thesis aimed: I) To develop a conceptual framework to explore aspects impacting parents’ engagement in home numeracy practices, II) To use the framework to inform the design of a new questionnaire to explore the nature of parents’ engagement with their six to eight-years-old children’s home numeracy practices in England. Method: First, socio-cultural ideas and findings from qualitative research on parents’ home numeracy experiences were used to develop the conceptual framework. This resulted in three components exploring parents’ engagement in relation to their knowledge, values, and emotional experiences associated with numeracy practices. Second, this framework, together with a literature review informed the design of the questionnaire. Focusing on both everyday life activities (implicit practices) and formal maths learning (explicit practices), items were designed to explore the components of the framework. An exploratory study was conducted to collect data and evaluate the questionnaire. Results: Findings showed that a full range of response options were used by parents to indicate the nature of their engagement. The open text responses assisted in better understanding why parents engage their children with certain practices over others. Overall, parents indicated engaging their children in a wide range of practices and used various tools to mediate learning. Some practices were perceived as having purely maths learning outcomes and others as life skills. Some parents valued certain practices as social opportunities whereas others were valued for obtaining numeracy knowledge. Parents also reported more positive experiences associated with implicit practices over explicit practices. Conclusion: This thesis offers two main contributions to research. First, the conceptual framework provided the theoretical foundations for reviewing existing parent questionnaires which revealed limited exploration into parents’ values and emotions associated with home numeracy practices. Second, the newly developed questionnaire addressed these gaps and provided a methodological contribution. The data collected showed that the questionnaire can capture the complexities of parents’ views and experiences with home numeracy practices.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Mohammadpour, Parmida

Contributors dc:contributor

• de Abreu, Guida
• Barnett, Anna

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/8any-vw63

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:28abee14-82ae-4e76-8acd-aef0541cfb6e:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1