Poster #86 - Understanding the Interaction Between Parental Involvement and Classroom Reading Instruction for Children from Low-Income Families

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

The development of children’s early reading skills is important because these skills serve as the building blocks for later ones (Morris et al., 2003). Unfortunately, children from low-income households tend to perform more poorly on reading assessments than do children from higher-income households (Duncan et al., 2007). Therefore, it is necessary to identify ways to promote the early reading skills of low-income children. One explanation for income-based differences in reading skills is differential access to enriching experiences at home and school (Conger & Donnellan, 2007). Although parents’ educational involvement is associated with children’s academic success (Fan & Chen, 2001), low-income parents may encounter more barriers which prevent such involvement (Hornby & Lafaele, 2011). In these instances, it may be possible for children’s experiences in the classroom to compensate for what occurs, or does not occur, at home. This study examined if the amount of daily classroom reading instruction moderated the relation between low-income parents’ educational involvement and children’s reading skills in first grade, when they are in the later stages of developing their early reading skills.
Data were from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten: 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011) and included 4380 first-grade children from low-income households (e.g., households with income below 200% of the federal poverty threshold). Children’s reading skills were measured using an assessment of children’s basic skills (e.g., print familiarity and letter recognition), vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Parents’ self-reported educational involvement was measured using a mean composite of nine home- and school-based activities. The amount of classroom reading instruction was reported by teachers. Demographic characteristics, including children’s race/ethnicity, number of siblings, and poverty level were collected from parents (see Table 1 for descriptive statistics).
A general linear model was conducted using SPSS’s Complex Samples procedure to account for the stratified clustered design of the ECLS-K: 2011 (stratum: W4CS4P_4TSTR; cluster: W4CS4P_4TPSU; weight: W4CS4P_4T0; see Table 1 for variables). The overall model accounted for 60.2% of the variance in children’s reading skills. We found that the relation between parents’ educational involvement and reading skills was stronger for children who received less than 2 hours of classroom reading instruction (<1.5 hours of instruction: b = 4.16, t(3785) = 3.61, p < .01; 1.5 to <2 hours of instruction: b = 2.91, t(3785) = 3.19, p < .01; see Figure 1).
Our results indicate that children who do not receive ample amounts of reading instruction in the classroom benefit the most from having involved parents. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of some forms of intervention, such as parents’ involvement, is dependent on what occurs within the classroom. As such, students of teachers who provide smaller amounts of instruction in their classrooms may benefit from having strong home-school partnerships. In addition, household poverty remained a significant predictor of children’s reading skills despite the sample being limited to children from low-income households. This suggests a need to consider using refined measures of household income when investigating low-income children’s reading skills.

Authors

• Brittany Gay, UMBC
  Presenting Author

• Susan Sonnenschein, UMBC
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shuyan Sun, University of Maryland Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linda Baker, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  Non-Presenting Author