Parents Learning Mathematics: For Their Children, From Their Children, With Their Children:

Adults find themselves needing or wanting to learn mathematics for many different purposes. Often, these adults want to learn mathematics in order to fulfill job requirements, to earn a GED or pursue higher education, or to better cope with the mathematical demands of daily life. But for some, the impetus to learn mathematics is grounded in their family lives, particularly in their desire to support their children's learning and progress in school. Many adults with weak mathematics skills fear encountering topics such as long division, fractions and percents, but they are even more profoundly challenged when their children bring home math homework that does not even resemble the mathematics they remember from their own schooling. Over the last decade, many school districts in the United States have implemented mathematics curricula in kindergarten through fifth grade that were developed in response to cognitive science research on how children learn mathematics. These curricula, known as "reform" curricula, emphasize the importance of developing a conceptual understanding of mathematics, reasoning, and problem-solving, as well as developing proficient computational procedures (Senk & Thompson, 2003). Many of the learning activities and procedures used in the classroom and in the accompanying homework assignments are designed to support this particular vision of children's mathematics learning. For some parents, the primary difficulty emerging from children's homework has to do with the fact that the reform curricula often use conventions that look different from those they remember from their own schooling (Bartlo & Sitomer, 2008; Peressini, 1998; Remillard & Jackson, 2006). Some of these adults may feel confident in their own math knowledge, but have to learn a new "system," including new ways of doing addition, multiplication, and division. Many other adults, however, did not come away from their own schooling experience with the numeracy skills, understanding and confidence that they need to make sense of their children's work as it arrives at home in the form of homework. In seeking to understand how parent/child homework activity may provide a learning opportunity for parents as well as for children, we examined three bodies of literature: research on parent involvement in homework, research on parent reengagement with mathematics learning, and research on the nature of parent/ child math talk during mathematics activities. Hoover-Dempsey, Battiato, Walker, Reed, DeJong, & Jones (2001) identified the types of activities in which parents engage as they work with their children on homework and Cai, Moyer, & Wang (1999) identified five roles that parents take on with respect to math homework in particular: motivator, resource provider, monitor, content advisor and learning counselor. Additional work has examined the impact of providing parents with training interventions designed to help them help their children with the math content or instructional approach encountered in school (Hyde, Else-Quest, Alibali, Knuth, & Romberg, 2006; Shumow, 1997). The goal in each of these studies was to help parents understand and use instructional strategies that were being practiced by the teachers in school. These parents were well educated, and little or no attention was paid to any parent learning that may have been occurring simultaneously. Parents were simply positioned to facilitate, in various ways, children's completion of and benefit from homework. The second body of research examined parents' reengagement with math learning in educational settings. Parents with gaps in their mathematics education are motivated by their desire to help their children and choose to participate in "math for parents" classes (Civil, 2001; Jackson & Ginsburg, 2008) or in more formal education (Brew, 2001). Once there, the parents continue to believe they are enhancing their ability to help their children, but powerfully find that they enjoy learning the math for themselves, especially as part of a learning community. …