The purpose of this study was to identify malleable practices in the homes of Spanish-speaking toddlers prior to school enrollment. This was achieved by examining daily activities and routines and the role older siblings played in these interactions to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the home language and literacy environment and…

Learning to read is an important milestone in children's development. Factors in the home environment is been linked to the behavioral and neural correlates of reading, but further work is needed to unpack the underlying mechanisms. The home literacy environment (HLE) plays a role in children's reading and language development, while parental…

This study examined whether children's formal and informal home literacy (HLE) and home numeracy (HNE) environments at 3 years old demonstrated domain-specific, and cross-domain effects on children's academic performance at 5 and 9 years old. Participants were 7,110 children (49.4% male; 84.4% Irish), recruited between 2007 and 2008 in Ireland.…

Parent engagement has been a cornerstone of Head Start since its inception in 1965. Prior studies have found evidence for small to moderate impacts of Head Start on parenting behaviors but have not considered the possibility that individual Head Start programs might vary meaningfully in their effectiveness at improving parenting outcomes. The…

Family-focused early learning programs aim to assist parents in supporting their young children language and literacy development. This study examined program access and learning opportunities for diverse families across a wide range of community-based settings in one eastern Canadian province. As well, the study examined practitioners'…

Culturally Relevant Pedagogical (CRP; Ladson-Billings, 1995) and textual strategic approaches to reading development are gaining acceptance and broader usage among students of all ages and walks of life. With this shift, quantitative measures of efficacy can confirm, bolster, and source new policies and strategies for implementation in new and…

Children develop linguistic competencies during interactions with more knowledgeable others. Consequently, one way to support this development is by enhancing the home literacy environment (HLE) in which children live. In this study a non-intensive intervention procedure was developed to improve HLE and linguistic competencies of 125 German…

A Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) framework was used in this study to gather and analyze the perceptions of mothers involved in a critical family literacy program designed to foster social and emotional development. Through narrative inquiry, participants discussed perceptions of their children's social-emotional development and the…

Research Findings: This study investigated the long-term interrelations among children's language competencies, their home literacy environment (HLE), and 3 aspects of socioemotional development from ages 3 to 8, controlling for characteristics of the child and family. For this sample of 547 typically developing German children, parents and…

Early literacy is largely acquired through child-led learning, yet current ways to support and enhance it may present problems of coercion and adult control. The "Following in our Footsteps II" intervention sought to circumvent such problems by teaching parent and educator pairs of 46 preschoolers how to make everyday literacy and…

The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support children's competency development. In this study, we used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses to compare two theoretical dimensions and three methods for assessing the HLE and their associations with linguistic and mathematical competencies of…

Background: This study tested a preschool-home partnership intervention, in which early childhood teachers encouraged the parents/caregivers of preschoolers to engage in dialogic reading at home. This was an experimental test of Bronfenbrenner's hypothesis that parental involvement in early care and education programs should promote child…

We evaluated an early literacy initiative implemented in partnership with faith-based organizations. Heads of the initiative train church leaders to host monthly literacy events during which those leaders educate parents about child development and model dialogic reading behaviors while caregivers and their children follow along. A survey and…

It is hypothesized that variability found in the effects of family literacy programs results from differences in implementation by parents. In this study, the implementation and effects of a Dutch program were examined in a sample of 207 kindergarteners (mean age at pre-test: 64 months). No main intervention effects on children's literacy…

This study provides a broad, macro-analysis of how the home literacy environment (HLE) manifests among Mayan families with preschool-aged children in Yucatan, Mexico. Despite a substantial body of work showing the significant contribution of the HLE to children's reading achievement in the U.S., little work examines the HLE and children's learning…