Poster #72 - Encouraging Academic Gains through Parent Workshops on Children’s Early Literacy and Social Development

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

An estimated one in five Canadian adults experiences fundamental literacy challenges (Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development & Statistics Canada, 2011). However, through proper early intervention, over 60% of otherwise poor-readers can learn to read (Savage, Carless, & Erten, 2009). Indeed, several approaches to promoting literacy development have shown success. For example, a recent second-order meta-analysis indicated a significant positive effect favouring the utilization of technology in formal early literacy instruction (Tamin, Bernard, Borokhovski, Abrami, & Schmid, 2011). Other research indicates that socio-emotional training increases not only social skills, attitudes, and positive behaviours, but academic performance as well (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2001; Wang, Haertel, & Wallberg, 1993). Further, decades of studies have demonstrated that family involvement is one of the most influential contributors to student achievement across grades (Epstein & Sheldon, 2006; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).
There are many ways to support literacy development and early intervention shows the most promise, so the goal for the current study was to examine the influence of providing parents with early literacy or socio-emotional instruction on their children’s performance in reading and social skill development. Parents were offered four workshops designed to assist them in identifying everyday opportunities to reinforce either early reading or social skills development. Two reading skills approaches were explored, traditional text reading and traditional text reading with computer-assisted learning opportunities. These two reading approaches were contrasted with a set of socio-emotional development workshops. If social skills training leads to global academic gains, it would be expected that there would be no significant differences between the three groups for the reading measures.
Participants were N = 586 children (308 males, M = 5.33 years, SD = .33) attending kindergarten in English-speaking schools in Ontario and Quebec. Children’s performance on measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological processing speed, reading accuracy, global academic skills, and social skills was assessed early in kindergarten and again early in grade one. The four parental workshops were offered at one-month intervals starting in the middle of the kindergarten year.
No performance differences were evident on the literacy or social measures at the beginning of kindergarten between the conditions and as expected, developmental increases in performance occurred over time. However, children of parents who received the reading workshops showed specific additional gains on the literacy measures. Further, when compared to children in the reading conditions, children in the social condition generally demonstrated either equivalent or greater scores on the literacy measures (see Figure 1).
These results add to the body of literature denoting the importance of parental involvement in children’s early academic achievement and suggest that providing instruction to parents on their children’s early development may be a potentially valuable addition to traditional school-based interventions. Further, our results support the postulation that promoting socio-emotional competence can lead to global academic gains and suggest that greater support of socio-emotional development could reduce the need for additional and specific academic support for some students.

Authors

• Katherine R. Wood, Carleton University
  Presenting Author

• Eileen Wood, Wilfrid Laurier University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alexandra Gottardo, Wilfrid Laurier University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Savage, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Noëlla Piquette, University of Lethbridge
  Non-Presenting Author