BUILDING A BRIDGE BETWEEN MEASUREMENT AND LATINE FAMILIES: THE CASE OF THE HOME NUMERACY ENVIRONMENT

The Home Numeracy Environment (HNE) is an essential factor that helps explain children’s numeracy skills. Research in this field has been developed mostly focused on monolingual English-speaking families. More recent studies have analyzed this construct for Latine families using existing HNE measures. However, the existing HNE scales have not taken into consideration cultural differences that contextualize the home environment (Kung et al., 2020), and using those measures in more diverse samples might provide biased results from a deficit perspective. 

Given the growth of the Latine population in the U.S. and the importance of the HNE for explaining monolingual children’s early numeracy skills, it is important to understand how Latine families foster those skills by identifying and recognizing those families’ funds of knowledge. In this thesis, I use a sequential mixed methods design with the overarching purpose of first understanding the HNE of Latine families living in the U.S. through semi-structured interviews and then developing a culturally contextualized HNE scale for Latine families. Findings from the interviews highlight that numeracy for Latine Families is everywhere and part of everyday informal interactions. The developed HNE scale for Latine families consist of 30 items and reflects three factors: Parents-Child Interactions, Parents’ Math Anxiety, and Math Beliefs. This work enriches the body of knowledge regarding the HNE, not only because of the focus on Latine families but also because of the use of inductive and deductive approaches, the inclusion of a group of experts to validate the scale, and procedures such as IRT to assess items’ performance on the scale. This study updates and increases the cultural relevance of an important measure, as it is the HNE