What are we doing now? Currently, three of our programs help parents support their child's literacy development.
Our Read-Aloud program, conducted for kids ages four and up, is provided by volunteers who visit housing sites weekly to read aloud with kids, talk, conduct activities and help kids choose a new book to keep. Parents are welcome to attend with their child, but more often, kids come on their own and take a new book home with them. By providing books for kids to read at home, TRC helps parents create a home environment that supports reading.In the Book Club, parents help their children choose books each month and receive tips on how to share those books with their kids when the books arrive in their monthly package. In addition, parents receive quarterly information about child and literacy development and information about available resources. The Book Club is targeted at families with children ages newborn to 5 years but serves families with kids of all ages.
The Marymount students found much in the literature that validates TRC's programming, while also revealing some areas where our programs could be enhanced. Here are some of the highlights.
TRC programs support parent engagement
The research review showed areas of parental engagement that positively affect scholastic achievement, which TRC programs encourage.
Home-based involvement
Studies found a positive correlation between home-based parental involvement and grades and attitude toward education as well as decreased behavioral issues. Home-based involvement was also found to be the most widely used form of scholastic engagement among African American families (Wang & Sheikh-Khali, 2014 and Ganotice & King, 2014).
TRC programs support home-based involvement by providing age-appropriate children's books to be read at home and by teaching parents about literacy development and book-sharing strategies.
Academic socialization refers to parents talking with kids about school work and the importance of education as well as supporting educational goals. This type of engagement had the strongest positive relationship with academic success among adolescents. However, children of all ages benefit from this kind of parental engagement (Wang & Sheikh-Khali, 2014; Reece, Staudt, & Ogle,
2013; Ganotice & King, 2014).
TRC’s programs (described above) help parents understand literacy development and create supportive home reading environments, which includes the crucial importance of conversation between parent and child. We encourage this conversation through the tips provided with each book from the Book Club and by providing bookmarks each week for the kids to take home from the Read-Aloud program. With a little information about the Read-Aloud theme and prompts for parents, we hope this bookmark, provided in Spanish and English, will help parents talk with their kids about their experience at the Read-Aloud and support their learning and curiosity. In reviewing the literature, the student researchers also found a Parent Reading Belief Inventory. This inventory demonstrated that parents’ beliefs were significantly associated with the reading practices between parent and child, along with the child’s attitude towards the book.
When socio-economic status is held constant, parental beliefs were significantly related to reading practices and child’s attitude and motivation (DeBaryshe & Binder, 1994). The higher scoring parents (those with more positive beliefs about reading) read to their children more frequently, had more books, had higher quality interactions and discussions with the child that stimulate language skills, and had a higher reported interest in books by their children.
For TRC, this means when we can influence a parent’s beliefs about reading, we can make an impact. Reading Families Workshops and Playgroups are designed to foster parents’ positive attitudes and beliefs about reading in addition to teaching skills and providing resources.
Where socio-economic status does matter is in parents’ access to resources to promote literacy and in their teaching style with their kids (Lam, Chow-Yeung, Wong, Lau, & Tse, 2013; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2009). TRC's programs target at-risk families to provide free, high quality books and teach effective teaching strategies to parents.
Barriers to participation
The literature about parental engagement also identified several factors that prevent some families from fully engaging in school or community programs, including schedule conflicts, child care responsibilities, working or going to school, and lack of energy in parents (Lamb-Parker et al., 2001). It also identified income as affecting the various resources and opportunities available to families. Libraries were not frequently used for a variety of reasons (Sonnenschein and Schmidt, 2000).
By bringing our services to families where they live, TRC's programs remove some of these logistical barriers.
While the Marymount literature review found research supporting TRC’s programming, it also identified areas where we can adjust our curriculum and programming with intensified focus on enhancing parental engagement. These areas include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Renewed effort to encourage library use,
• Strengthening parents’ understanding of literacy development to enable them to more effectively advocate for their children at school,
• Explicitly encouraging conversation and shared reading activities by providing prompts and teaching an increasing variety of book-sharing techniques.
As TRC continues to grow, adding Read-Aloud and Book Club partners in the Washington, DC metro area, we also will continue to deepen and enhance our programs to better serve developing readers and their families.
For a bibliography of studies cited in this post, click here.
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