Question

Gender and number words: Chang, Sandhofer, and Brown (2011) wondered whether mothers used number words more, on average, with their preschool sons than with their preschool daughters. Each participating family included one mother and one child—either female or male. They speculated that early exposure to more number words might predispose children to like mathematics. They reported the following: “An independent-samples t test revealed statistically significant differences in the percentages of overall numeric speech used when interacting with boys compared with girls, t(30) = 2.40, p< .05, d = .88. That is, mothers used number terms with boys an average of 9.49% of utterances (SD = 6.78%) compared with 4.64% of utterances with girls (SD = 4.43%)” (pp. 444–445).

Describe how you could design an experiment to test whether exposure to more number words in preschool leads children to like mathematics more when they enter school.

Answer 1