Parents as Classroom Volunteers and Kindergarten Students' Emergent Reading Skills

Previous research indicates that parent involvement in education is an important component in school success and is correlated with increased attendance and achievement and fewer behavioral problems. This teacher action research was conducted to investigate the effects of working with parents in small groups on kindergarten children's emergent literacy performance. The 56 children that were enrolled in the morning and afternoon sessions of the first author's kindergarten class in a rural public school were randomly assigned to either the treatment (parent input) or the comparison (no parent input) condition during small group language enrichment. The aim was to investigate the influence of parent classroom volunteers on kindergarten children's early literacy learning. The first hypothesis of the study is that having parents in the classroom is positively and significantly related to emergent reading skills. Second is that children have positive attitudes about having parents in their classroom.

Children were selected at random into two groups. One of the groups had the opportunity to interact with the volunteering parents to promote reading skills through activities such as writing in journals, reading books and doing projects. The volunteer may be a parent of a student in the comparison group. The volunteers worked for several months.

As a result of the study the researcher confirmed their hypothesis by showing that parents made a significant contribution on children's word recognition, relative to the comparison group children who were not assigned parents.

I expected the parents volunteering to be a positive influence. As they also note in the paper at least this would be increasing the adult to children ratio. So to eliminate this effect we can repeat the study while having another group taking attention from non-parent volunteers. I think they didn't consider this because it is more difficult to find non-parent volunteers and as a result it would be less relevant practically. Another interesting finding of the study was that literacy in the home took place in the same families across generations, the kids who received literary attention from their parent grown up to be similar parents enjoying reading to their kids and showing similar attention. I appreciated the author's attention to eliminate possible biases by matching parents to others' children.

It proved to be important to take care of when they reported in their results the fact that those parents children were slightly better on average even if they were in the comparison group.

Teaching Comprehension through Literature: A Teacher-Research Project to Develop Fifth Graders' Reading Strategies and Motivation

This study is originated through two teachers' dissatisfaction with their students' reading success. While their level was enough for identifying simple facts