Kathryn Krasnoff, FCLC 2026

Major: Psychology

Bio: During her time at Fordham, Katie has developed interests in developmental psychology research. She is an honors thesis student in the Cognition, Development, and Education Lab directed by Dr. Jing Tian, and hopes to continue supporting child development research after she graduates. In the future, she hopes to pursue a PhD in school psychology to examine how social support from parents and educators can help children's learning and academic achievement on both systemic and individual levels.

Title of Research: Early U.S.-China Differences in Math Ability

Mentor: Jing Tian, Psychology

Research Partners: Qianru Tiffany Yang, Juntong Yu, and Meredith L. Rowe

Abstract: Chinese students consistently outperform their U.S. peers in math throughout school, with these differences emerging as early as age 4 (Miller et al., 1995; OECD, 2023). Prior research has primarily attributed these cross-national differences to instructional quality, educational system, and linguistic features of number systems (Miller et al., 1995; Laski & Yu, 2014). Less is known about the role of parental math support before formal schooling begins.

This study examines 4-year-old children and their parents from the U.S. (n = 50) and China (n = 44). Children completed digit recognition, number line estimation, number comparison, and cardinality (below 10 and above 10) tasks. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their knowledge of children’s math development and the frequency of home math activities. Lastly, parents’ math talk during a book-reading activity with their children was analyzed. 

Chinese children outperformed their U.S. peers on digit recognition and the above-10 items on the cardinality measure. U.S. parents reported more frequent math activities and believed children should be exposed to math concepts at an earlier age. Chinese parents used a greater proportion of math talk than U.S. parents. In both countries, correlations between self-reported parental support and knowledge and children’s math ability were positive when significant. In contrast, parents’ math talk during the book-reading activity negatively associated with children’s math ability when significant. These findings highlight the importance of parents in children’s early math development and suggest parental support and knowledge could help explain emerging U.S.-China gaps in young children’s math ability.