Pelletier – parents in kindergarten study results

In the Parents in Kindergarten Study—that’s what we ended up calling it although the actual title was School Readiness for Diverse Families—knowing that readiness itself is a “slippery slope” term, in that particular study, all the parents in the kindergarten classes at the schools where we were going to do the research, were invited to come to school with their child. There was a very good turnout but because it was during the day, it was mostly attended by stay-at-home mothers, although some fathers came some weeks instead of having the mother come. So, sometimes parents traded off and one parent would come one week and another would come another week.  

The attendance at that was quite good, I mean there wasn’t attrition the way there has been in other studies. So there was a fairly high level of commitment and I think because the children were always after their parents to attend—like they really looked forward to Friday morning, if it was Friday morning, that mommy or daddy would be coming to school with them.  

So the results of that study, there are two ways of looking at that. One were the short-term results. So we looked at, we actually measured parents’ perceptions of their children’s academic and social learning. And teacher’s perceptions of the children’s academic and social learning, and then we also took direct measures of the children’s learning using standardized and non-standardized tests. So for instance, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Test of Early Reading Ability, an early writing measure that I developed, and lots of other measures, social measures.  

So we did that before the program which was typically in the fall of the kindergarten year, either junior or senior kindergarten, and then the post-test would happen in May, May and June. So we looked at the short-term results and we did find effects compared to a control group. We had a control group at the same schools—wonderful parents agreed to have their children participate as control children—and in comparison to the control group there were some short term gains and those gains were particularly salient for English second language children. But not always: it really depended on the school to be honest with you. It really depended on the school, how much influence of the parent involvement would be.  

So, at a higher income school, for instance, you would see fewer strong effects, say in vocabulary development because those children are already getting fairly good vocabulary stimulation at home. Whereas you would see a stronger vocabulary increase among children who are English language learners, partly because their parents were learning English with them and the tests were measuring English language vocabulary. 

So that was the short term. We then followed those children several years later when the junior kindergarten children were in grade one and the senior kindergarten children were in grade two, or from the year before in grade three. So we had that long-term cohort. We followed 100 children with a control group. And the long term results did show a lasting effect of the parent involvement piece. So, I mean, that was pleasantly surprising to us because there has been a lot of research in the past that shows that these short-term interventions actually don’t have long-term effects. But in this case it did and if was for vocabulary development in particular that we were looking at. Partly because it was so difficult to measure early reading later on with a measure that would be consistent with an earlier reading measure. That is the difficulty in doing this kind of longitudinal research. That a later measure, which was the Woodcock Reading Mastery, is not the same as the Test of Early Reading Ability. 

Nevertheless, we are going to try to pull out some commonalities and look at early reading over the long term but definitely for vocabulary where the same exact measure was used, we did see a long term effect, particularly for children whose parents became involved at the earliest point. That is at the beginning of junior kindergarten as opposed to, say, the middle of senior kindergarten saw that gain. And particularly for children who were English language learners.