The Relationship between secondary school students' and their parents' achievement in mathematical problem solving
Date
1974
Authors
Leung, Raymond Gar Mun
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Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship between parent and child achievement in mathematics problem solving. Stafford, assuming that mathematics problem solving is a, sex-linked trait, proposed that the correlational pattern between family members should be in the following order of magnitude: father-daughter approximately equal to mother-son, greater than motherĀ-daughter, with the father-son being the lowest.
Volunteer parents and their children wrote a mathematics problem test. Correlation coefficients were calculated between the various family members to test the predicted order of the correlations.
Stafford also hypothesized the mean score of boys on mathematics problem solving tests should be higher than that of the girls. Therefore, the mean scores of boys and girls on a mathematics problem test were compared.
The findings for the predicted ordered correlation coefficients neither confirmed nor refuted Stafford's hypothesis. Possible causes of the inconclusive results are the problems of small sample size and restriction of range.
Also, there was no significant difference found between mean scores of boys and girls in mathematics achievement. This and the above finding , however, for reasons mentioned in the study, do not necessarily show that Stafford's hypothesis is invalid.