Examining the Nature of Parental Beliefs and Expectations about Early Learning Skills and the Early Home Learning Environment

As educational institutions seek to strengthen domain-specific areas of development, particularly in STEM, understanding early influences is crucial. This study focuses on parental beliefs and the home learning environment. Parents may have beliefs and practices specific to literacy, numeracy, science, and executive functions (e.g., self-control). Alternatively, parents may have consistent beliefs and practices across all these domains. We address three main questions: whether parental beliefs and expectations about early learning skills are general or domain-specific; if the early home learning environment is a single, domain-general construct or comprised of distinct yet related factors, such as for math versus literacy versus science; and how parental beliefs and expectations relate to the home learning environment. To address these questions, we will use secondary data from a survey by Ellis et al. (2022) of 1,046 parents and fit categorical Confirmatory Factor Analysis models to test whether parental beliefs and the home learning environment are domain-general or domain-specific. The best-fitting models will then be incorporated into a final model to examine their interrelations. This approach will clarify the relations among parental beliefs and expectations and the early learning activities they reported engaging in at home. This will provide insights to inform interventions that support early learning skills, especially in domains of interest such as STEM.