Parent as a Companion for Solving Challenging Math Problems: Insights from Multi-modal Observational Data

Abstract

Parents play key roles in forming their children’s trajectories of development. Parental involvement has been studied in early grade reading and math facts’ practices. However, their hands-on engagement with children’s math problem solving activities, in particular with the goal to develop higher order problem solving skills and promote perseverance behaviors, has not received substantial attention yet. With the goal to understand the dynamic interplay between children’s affective and cognitive processes and parents’ support, we have collected multi-modal data of multiple parentchild dyads where parents serve as companions for their children while working through challenging math problems at home. In this paper, we report some initial findings with this data which has been annotated with a combination of automatic and manual methods.