Relations Between Parents' Math Anxiety and Children's Math Learning, and the Role of Homework Help

At the intersection of developmental and educational science, recent studies have focused on the role of parents’ attitudes and beliefs towards math and their homework-helping behaviors. Specifically, findings from Maloney et al. (2015) suggest that parents’ math-related anxiety had a negative effect on children’s gains in math achievement only when the parents frequently helped with math homework – suggesting that frequent exposure to negative views towards math at home may diminish children’s math motivations, and in turn, their math achievement. To further understand this complex developmental mechanism, the current study aimed to replicate these findings with a larger, and more diverse sample of elementary school children. A sample of 2,953 kindergarten, first-, second-, and third-grade students (49.37% female) nested across 239 classrooms in a Southeastern U.S. state were assessed on their math achievement at fall and spring of the school year. Parents self-reported their math anxiety and frequency of homework help. Results revealed significant, negative main effects of parents’ math anxiety and homework help on children’s gains in math achievement across the school year. However, contrary to the work of Maloney et al. (2015), no significant interaction effect between these two parent-level predictors on children’s math achievement was found. These findings underscore the role of parents’ math anxiety as it relates to more negative child math outcomes. Accordingly, there remains a need for additional examination of parents’ homework help and how this process may play role in children’s change over time in math achievement.