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All Publications & Resources WORKING WITH TEACHERS AND FAMILIES DEVELOPMENT PERIODS |
COMPLEMENTARY LEARNING CONNECTIONS
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Family Involvement News: January 2009
We at Harvard Family Research Project are committed to keeping you up-to-date on what's new in family involvement. View our list of links to current reports, articles, events, and opportunities in the family involvement field.
Kindergarten Home Visit Project
The need for home–-school collaboration begins even before a child’s the first day of school. Researcher Amy Schulting shares data from a recent evaluation study to describe how one home visiting project eases children's transition to kindergarten.
Effective Home-School Communication
Not all home–school communication succeeds in supporting student learning. In this article, Duke University's JoBeth Allen offers tips for effective communication between schools and families that can help children to learn and grow.
The Parent Teacher Home Visit Project
When community organizations, schools, and local government work together with families, they can help children learn. Carrie Rose writes about the Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, which draws on a community organizing model to sustain parent–teacher communication across students' school years.
Tapping Into Technology: The Role of the Internet in Family–School Communication
The first large-scale study to examine the usage and benefits of Internet-based family–school communication finds implications for family involvement during adolescence and raises concerns about educational equity.
Family Computing and the Academic Engagement and Achievement of Low-Income, Urban Adolescents: Findings From the Computers for Youth Intervention
Computers for Youth looks at how family computing can connect adolescents with their parents and sustain their engagement in school.
What is Complementary Learning?
This short publication will give you a quick overview and some concrete examples of complementary learning. It includes information about what complementary learning looks like, some examples of complementary learning systems in practice today, and a description about what is different about complementary learning from traditional programs and services. Finally, we'll introduce you to Marcus, a fictional teenager whose story illustrates how complementary learning can positively affect the lives of students from birth through adolescence.
Building the Future of Family Involvement
This double issue of The Evaluation Exchange examines the current state of and future directions for the family involvement field in research, policy, and practice. Featuring innovative initiatives, new evaluation approaches and findings, and interviews with field leaders, the issue is designed to spark conversation about where the field is today and where it needs to go in the future.
Promoting Family Involvement
This article looks at the role of family involvement during the middle and high school years, emphasizing implications and recommendations for principals and superintendents.
Complementary Learning in Action: Jacksonville Children's Commission
This profile from the Complementary Learning in Action series describes how the Jacksonville Children's Commission aims for a coordinated system of care from birth through adolescence.
Building Villages to Raise Our Children: Six Volume Set
This set of six volumes offers practical advice for establishing and managing a family support program.
Family Involvement in Middle and High School Students' Education
This research brief synthesizes the latest research that demonstrates how family involvement contributes to adolescents' learning and development. The brief summarizes the latest evidence base on effective involvement—specifically, the research studies that link family involvement during the middle and high school years to outcomes and programs that have been evaluated to show what works.
Tomasito's Mother Comes to School/La mamá de Tomasito visita la escuela
Spanish Translation Available in Storybook Corner. This online bilingual storybook about family involvement at school is designed to engage children and their families. For educators, the printable online storybook is an easy-to-use family involvement tool that supports literacy. The story was developed from research and is based on the real experiences of one Latino boy and his family who are acculturating to the U.S.
Young Latino Infants and Families: Parental Involvement Implications from a Recent National Study
This study provides a deeper understanding of how cultural practices combine with other factors to shape parenting behaviors among families in the United States in the first year of children's lives. Several findings provide information about ways in which practitioners and Latino families can more effectively engage with young Latino children to influence their cognitive, social, language, and literacy development—and therefore facilitate their school readiness.
Changing the Conversation About Home Visiting: Scaling Up With Quality
The purpose of this paper is to determine what the evidence and conventional wisdom say about scaling up home visiting as one of the best ways to support parents and promote early childhood development. To answer this question, we examined the available research evidence, interviewed leaders from six of the national home visiting models, and interviewed researchers who have studied home visiting. The area of interest for guiding future research, practice, and policy is whether home visiting can be delivered at broad scale and with the quality necessary to attain demonstrable, positive outcomes for young children and their parents.
Family Involvement Interventions: Shining the Spotlight on Evaluation (Symposium)
This panel symposium, held at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Chicago on April 10, 2007, followed up on HFRP's family involvement sessions at previous AERA meetings in 2005 and 2006. The 2007 symposium featured discussion regarding the evaluation of family involvement interventions
Family and Community Engagement in the Boston Public Schools: 1995–2006
This chapter describes the evolution of Boston Public Schools' family and community engagement efforts. The authors discuss how collective community action contributed to a critical reframing of the district's approach to family and community engagement over a 10-year period. Chapter by Abby R. Weiss and Helen Westmoreland in A Decade of Urban School Reform: Persistance and Progress in the Boston Public Schools 2007. Edited by S. Paul Reville with Celine Coggins. Published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Home School Community Partnerships
This course is designed to acquaint and apprentice teachers in early childhood education to the theories, practices, skills, and knowledge(s) of home and school relationship building in home and school partnership literatures. There is a focus in this course to develop understandings of diverse contexts and ethics when working with families and children. In this course you will study yourself, the school, communities, families, and children you work for as well as the contexts of future teaching situations.
Making It Work: Low-Income Working Mothers' Involvement in Their Children's Education, Digest Version
This study finds that maternal employment is associated with low-income mothers' involvement in their children's education in complex ways and that working mothers use a variety of strategies to stay involved in their children's education.
Family Involvement in Elementary School Children's Education
This research brief synthesizes the latest research that demonstrates how family involvement contributes to elementary-school-age children's learning and development. The brief summarizes the latest evidence base on effective involvement—specifically, the research studies that link family involvement during the elementary school years to outcomes and programs that have been evaluated to show what works.
Family Involvement in School and Low-Income Children's Literacy Performance
This groundbreaking study demonstrates that when families' involvement in school increases over the elementary years, children's achievement increases. Furthermore, the authors show that family involvement in school matters most for children whose mothers have less education.
The Family Involvement Storybook: A New Way to Build Connections With Familes
This article describes five ways for teachers to use family involvement storybooks in their early childhood education classrooms. The article also includes a vignette about the impact of sharing a family involvement storybook in one third-grade class.
Approaches to Parental Involvement for Improving the Academic Performance of Elementary School Children in Grades K-6
This report summarizes the most dependable evidence on the effect of parental involvement intervention programs for improving the academic performance of elementary school-age children. The authors show that parent involvement has a positive and significant effect on children's overall academic performance.
Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice
Examine how effective family-strengthening interventions can positively impact families and children in this practitioner-friendly brief from Harvard Family Research Project. Lessons From Family-Strengthening Interventions: Learning From Evidence-Based Practice is based on our review of interventions that have been rigorously evaluated through experimental and quasi-experimental studies. We offer educators, service providers, and evaluators recommendations for creating successful programs and evaluations.
How Does Parenting Matter in Adolescence? Insights From Variable- and Person-Centered Approaches
This paper examines relations between a variety of parenting behaviors and indicators of adolescent adjustment. Variable-centered analyses suggest that parents establish rules in the face of poor adolescent adjustment. Parenting behaviors focused on cognitive stimulation in the home and through school involvement were associated with positive adolescent adjustment. Person-centered analyses identified five distinct clusters based on the pattern of parenting behaviors and confirmed results found in the variable-centered analyses.