What interventions are effective in engaging families in supporting learning at home? One page summary

Research Question:  What interventions are effective in engaging  families/parent in supporting learning at home?

Methodology: 83 families from 8 classrooms including Head Start and public pre-k program.  (Final retention rate of 93%)

Pre and posttests gathered information from both families and teaching staff.  For a 10 week period families were given weekly engagement assignments to be done at home.  Families were randomly assigned to one of 3 levels of interventions.

Level 1 interventions were suggestions of activities to be completed at home without special resources.

Level 2 interventions were suggestions with prompts to encourage the activities to be completed.

Level 3 interventions were activities supported with resources to work with.  8 of the 10 level 3 activities were treated as a lending library.

Pretest family responses:

When asked “In what ways are you involved in your child’s education?” parent’s narrative replies were:  Working on numbers, counting, shapes, colors, and or puzzles 34 %, Reading to/with my child 31%;  Helping with things child needs to learn/Homework help 21%;  Work on alphabet 14%; Talk about what child did at school 12%;  Visit school/volunteer 10%

When parents were asked “How else would you like to be involved in your child’s education?” they responded:   Any way possible/whatever teacher recommends 20%; Volunteer in classroom 13%

Findings:

Research coordinated by Bev Schumacher, bschumacher@wi.rr.com E-mail if wanting project description or data report

Data tabulation and analysis Vonda Jump Norman, PhD @ Utah State University