Developing and validating a measure of parental knowledge about early math development

Parents’ knowledge about the math skills that most preschool-aged children can develop might be an important component of the Home Math Environment (HME) as it might shape their math beliefs and efforts to support their preschoolers’ math development. This study aimed to systematically develop measures of parents’ knowledge about two critical early math topics, numeracy, and patterning, across five studies conducted with a total of 616 U.S. parents of 3- to 5-year-olds (66% mothers, 54% sons, 73% White, 60% college-educated). Parents were recruited via CloudResearch or a university database. Study 1 focused on item generation to revise a previous measure to capture a wider set of children’s early math skills and analysis of the psychometric properties of the measure after it was completed by 161 parents via a survey. Study 2 included an analysis of a new sample of parents (n = 21) who responded to the measures twice across two weeks to explore test–retest reliability. The measures were iteratively revised, administered to new samples, and analyzed in Studies 3 (n = 45), 4 (n = 46), and 5 (n = 344). The measures demonstrated adequate internal consistency and validity (construct, convergent, and discriminant) in Study 5 such as being positively related to parents’ numeracy and patterning beliefs about their children. Overall, the newly developed measures satisfy standards for the development of an adequate measure and can be used to better understand what parents know about early math development and how this relates to the HME that they facilitate.