Understanding Parent and Teacher Involvement in Head Start Children's Language and Literacy Development

• In Event: Data for Decisions: Family and Child Experiences Survey as a Model of Policy-Driven and Policy-Guiding Research

Abstract

In this presentation, we describe how our work with FACES data helped us to understand broad, national trends in the nature and frequency of Head Start families’ involvement in early language and literacy learning at home and in school. Second, we explain how our prior research using FACES research led us to several more very specific, practical questions about the most feasible and effective ways to enhance Head Start families’ and teachers’ experiences as partners around early language and literacy. Finally, we describe findings from our initial needs-assessment work with Head Start educators and families and provide an overview of the resulting design of our intervention.

The development of our family-school partnership intervention is grounded in Bronfenbrenner’s (2005) bioecological systems theory, which posits that children’s development and learning is shaped independently and cumulatively by a variety of factors, the most proximal of which are the family and the school. In addition, our current work was informed by our discovery that, within the nationally representative FACES datasets, Head Start families report high levels of involvement in their children’s language and literacy learning (Hindman & Morrison, 2010; Hindman, Miller, Froyen, & Skibbe, 2012), but that educator outreach to families is highly variable (Hindman & Morrison, 2010). Moreover, FACES data show that family involvement yields modest effects on children’s academic development in Head Start and beyond (Hindman, 2014; Hindman, Skibbe, Miller, & Zimmerman, 2010; Hindman & Wasik, 2013). We thus wondered whether the contributions of Head Start families’ involvement in children’s early language and literacy learning could be enhanced if the focus and frequency were more tightly aligned with the classroom curriculum.

We conducted eight 90-minute focus groups with participants representing a variety of roles in Head Start (e.g., education coordinators, family service coordinators, teachers, parents) to explore specific strategies through which Head Start families and educators could feasibly, sustainably bridge the home-school gap to support children’s mastery of particular skills, especially the hard-to-change outcome of early vocabulary. Prompts tapped how often, and in what ways, educators engaged Head Start families; what strategies were most successful and why; and what barriers families encountered to home and/or school engagement. (Notably, these clusters of questions map to but elaborate on variables in the FACES study.)

Qualitative analysis of these discussions reveals several themes: (1) families were extremely invested in helping children build skills, particularly when learning could be readily observed or measured; (2) families appreciated having a choice of involvement opportunities; (3) when families encountered challenges with “homework,” they often used technology (e.g., smart phones) to get help from the internet or from friends; and (4) clear expectations or deadlines for the completion of involvement tasks were highly motivating.

Results from this study add nuance to information gleaned from the FACES data and offer an example of how data from a large-scale, nationally representative study of Head Start can help to inform the design of other more intense studies. They also provide several clear directions for intervention development, which we will discuss in our presentation.

Author

• Barbara Wasik, Temple University