School Readiness Intervention: Pre-Intervention Characteristics as Moderators of Intervention Effect on Literacy and Parent Support

• In Event: Unpacking Longitudinal Outcomes of School Readiness Among Low-Income and Ethnic-Minority Students: Findings From Four Projects

Abstract

The Research-based Developmentally Informed parent (REDI-P) program is a randomized-controlled trial of a home-visiting intervention designed to promote emergent literacy skills along with other school readiness skills. Home-visiting programs for economically disadvantaged preschool children often focus on promoting parent support for learning in order to boost child academic school readiness. The goal is to increase parent support for learning by helping parents effectively talk and play with their children. Although quasi-experimental studies show promising results for these widely used programs, randomized controlled trials document a lack of reliable impact on child academic skills. Since quasi-experimental studies of many parenting programs show significantly stronger effects than randomized-controlled studies (Sweet & Applebaum, 2004), home-visiting programs may be more effective for some families than for others. For example, factors such as parenting skills and motivation may serve as selection biases in quasi-experimental trials and predict more positive program outcomes for children than found in randomized-controlled trials. A few randomized trials of parenting programs to promote school readiness have tested for moderation associated with socio-economic risk, providing emerging evidence that children benefit most when parents have fewer risks. This study explored concurrent changes in levels of parent support and child literacy skills that occurred over the course of the REDI intervention, and examined the impact of pre-intervention parent support and child literacy skills as potential moderators of parent and child outcomes.

Two-hundred preschool children in Head Start (55% girls; 20% Hispanic, 25% African-American, 55% European American; M age = 4.80 years old) participated in the REDI-P program. REDI-P included 10 home visits during the spring when the child was in Head Start and six “booster” sessions during the fall after the child transitioned into kindergarten. All home visits followed a well-specified manualized curriculum, with topics and evidence-based teaching strategies focused on the domains of language-emergent literacy skills and social-emotional skills.

Cross-lagged structural equation models and follow-up analyses indicated that pre-intervention levels of parent support for learning was a moderator of intervention impact, with higher baseline parent support predicting greater gains in child literacy skills and lower baseline parent support predicting greater gains in parent support for learning. Conversely, the REDI-Parent program promoted the greatest gains in parent support when parents entered the program with low levels of support.

These findings suggest that families may benefit from home-visiting school readiness interventions in different ways: child skill acquisition may be greatest when parents are initially high in support, whereas parenting may improve most when parents are initially low in support. This is consistent with a larger theoretical literature on dual generation programs which seek to build interventions components that serve both parents and children rather than addressing them individually (Haskins et al., 2014). However, the notion that children and parents are each benefitting separately is different from an expectation that gains in parent skills will translate into and mediate positive child outcomes, which is often expected in home-visiting programs targeting child school readiness but rarely tested and rarely confirmed.

Authors

• Erin T. Mathis, The Pennsylvania State University

• Karen L. Bierman, The Pennsylvania State University