RESEARCH REVIEW

Many adults studying in adult education programs list the desire to improve their ability to help their children with homework and schooling as one key reason for their attendance. Yet, many challenges have to be overcome to achieve this goal.

Parents' content knowledge and repertoire of helping skills may not develop as their children encounter more advanced topics in school. For parents with limited mathematics education, this juncture often occurs by 4^th or 5^th grade with topics such as long division, fractions, or percent. Parents are also not likely to be familiar with or fully understand the ideas underlying processes and topics emphasized in new school mathematics curricula, such as mathematical problem solving and communication, group work on projects, use of calculators, data analysis, or number sense and estimation. Discrepancies between procedures or shortcuts that a parent has learned and what his or her child is expected to do as part of math class may cause a parent to feel helpless or lead to friction with a child or teacher.

Parents may have difficulty accepting some of the new or nontraditional aspects of their children's mathematics schoolwork, particularly if their own past experiences with math learning were often negative and/or focused on rote learning of algorithms and computations. Parent's beliefs about what "knowing math" is and what "learning math" should look like can influence the types of school-related processes and tasks that parents value and encourage. Similarly, parental beliefs and prior school experiences may make it difficult for families to recognize that informal, real-work applications of mathematics within the family culture can support and extend school-based learning.

What can be done to assist parents who want to support their children's learning of mathematics? Educators such as Ginsburg, Bempechat, and Chung (1992) suggest that parents should experience positive learning events on their own and learn and practice techniques for helping their children. However, K-12 schools typically do not focus on providing parents with extended positive experiences with mathematics learning or acquainting parents with the roles that they could undertake to support their children's learning. Adult education programs have the potential to make significant contributions to both adult and family-based mathematics learning by developing programs and creating contexts in which the above issues can be addressed.

In thinking about work with parents on their children's learning of mathematics, adult educators need to consider two noteworthy initiatives that have so far existed separately from each other; family literacy and family math.

The recognition of the influence of family systems on children's literacy skills has led to the recent emergence of a "family literacy" movement. Primarily, two frameworks may inform the design of family literacy intervention models. Some programs focus on helping the family support the development of skills and behaviors required in the children's classroom, leading to parent-child activities that follow a school-based model of literacy acquisition. Other programs aim to extent emerging literacy skills by embedding learning within families' everyday literacy practices and interactions, even if their purposes or circumstances are different from those of formal school-based learning contexts (see Gadsden, 1994, for a complete discussion of different approaches in this area).

Although many family literacy programs are being established around the nation, so far no programs have begun (as far as we know) to address systematically the mathematics aspects of children's schooling or the mathematical skills of parents participating in family literacy programs. Lessons learned about what makes some family literacy programs particularly effective, or the implications of the conceptual differences between dominant frameworks in the field, have so far not informed work on family involvement in mathematics education.

The term Family Math refers to a specific program established by the EQUALS project at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980s, which gained recognition mostly within K-12 schools rather than adult education programs. The program has disseminated a very useful resource (Stenmark, Thompson & Cossey, 1986), and several hundred teachers have been certified as trainers nationwide. Numerous school systems and some community colleges have instituted Family Math programs; these typically involve 3 to 6 two-hour meetings during which parents and their children work together on enjoyable games, puzzles, and other non-routine activities that develop estimation and number sense skills and that facilitate problem solving.

Qualitative evidence (reports from parents, children, teachers, and school officials) indicate positive changes in parents' attitudes and beliefs about mathematics learning. Yet, by design, Family Math programs focus primarily on the children rather than on the parents. Thus, they do not attempt to affect the actual mathematical skills of the participating parents or to develop parents' skills in modeling productive problem-solving strategies that support classroom learning. They also spend little time to attune parents to informal instances where mathematical skills are used or can be developed within the family home culture.

Many critical questions should be addressed during the design of next-generation math-related, family-based programs. Examples include:

• Can parents improve their ability to support their children's learning of mathematics (e.g., through games and puzzles) without also having time to enhance their own math skills and to reflect upon the effectiveness of their own coping patterns with numeracy tasks (both in class and in everyday or work contexts)?
• Should programs provide parents time to reflect upon and learn new ways to interact with and model problem-solving behaviors to their children? What if parents are math-anxious and lack confidence in handling numeracy tasks?
• Is a change in parents' attitudes and beliefs, which may be expected if games and fun activities are included in a program, going to affect the way parents interact with their children outside the classroom?
• Much of learning math or handling mathematical tasks in real-world contexts requires reading, writing, and communicating; what should be the degree of integration between the "literacy" and "math" components of a family program?
• Should programs take time to acquaint parents with recent changes in school curricula and new processes in mathematics learning? How likely are adult educators to be knowledgeable in this area? Should linkages with local K-1 2 schools be established?

We have begun to explore these and related issues in a book titled, Learning Mathematics in a Family Context (Gal & Stoudt, editors; to be published in 1996 by Hampton Press). As the book is still under development, we hope that this brief article will place the issues of intergenerational learning and support for development of the numeracy skills of parents and children on the agenda of the adult education community. We believe that current family literacy and family math initiatives provide a reasonable starting point for adult literacy programs interested in enhancing both parents' and children's skills and beliefs regarding mathematics. However, current programs, while well intentioned, address only a subset of the issues pertaining to parents and their possible role in children's learning of mathematics.

A more integrative approach is needed that will build upon and go beyond current family math and family literacy intervention models. Instead of focusing resources separately on each type of intervention, programs may want to explore a more comprehensive approach that prevents competition for resources and acknowledges the conceptual and pragmatic links between literacy and numeracy.

We conclude with a reminder regarding the need to implement effective family-based math programs. A recent survey conducted by NCAL's Numeracy Project revealed that less than 10% of the over 80,000 teachers working with adult learners in the United States are trained to teach mathematics to adults (Gal & Schuh, 1994). Professional development opportunities for adult educators must be enhanced if adult educators and their programs are expected to be able to effectively support the achievement of both parents and their children.

Gadsden, V. L. (1994). Understanding family literacy: Conceptual issues facing the field (Tech. Rep. TR94-02). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, National Center on Adult Literacy.

Gal, I., & Schuh, A. (1994). Who counts in adult literacy programs? A national survey of numeracy education (Tech. Rep. TR94-09]. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, National Center on Adult Literacy.

Gal, I., & Stoudt, A. (in press). Learning mathematics in a family context. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Ginsburg, H. P., Bempechat, J., & Chung, Y. E. (1992). Parent influences on children's mathematics. In T. G. Sticht, M. J. Beeler, & B. A. McDonald (Eds.) The intergenerational transfer of cognitive skills. Volume II: Theory and research in cognitive science (pp. 91-121 & Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Stenmark, J. D., Thompson, V., & Cossey, R. (1986). Family Math. Berkeley, CA: University or California, Lawrence Hall of Science.

Iddo Gal is director of NCAL's Adult Numeracy Project.
Ashley Stoudt is on the staff of NCAL's research project on Adult Numeracy