Associations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent and child literacy-related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home…

Family literacy refers to parents and their children using literacy together at home. They participate in literacy experiences in a natural way during their daily routines. Studies on family literacy show its impact on the children's literacy development. For more than five decades, family literacy studies have demonstrated the importance of the…

The authors of this article begin with an introduction to the holistic concept of family literacy and learning and its implementation in various international contexts, paying special attention to the key role played by the notions of lifelong learning and intergenerational learning. The international trends and experiences they outline inspired…

In Fall 2016, the Families as Partners Initiative, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, hosted its first parent camp for families of five schools in North Austin. This report describes the camp activities and summarizes the feedback parents provided about their experience.

Reading ability is profoundly important, for individuals and for the societies of which they are a part. Research indicates that we should be successfully teaching 95% of children to read, yet, in reality, high rates of reading failure are common in western, industrialized nations. In large part, this reflects a failure to translate into practice…

This study draws on interviews with 26 individuals who attained an advanced degree and whose parents did not attend university and who reported having at least one older sibling. Participants were asked about independent reading practices in their youth and the reading practices of their older siblings. Participants reported many memories of their…

Straddling conventional education system boundaries between adult learners and children, and between employment-related and social benefits, family literacy programmes are not well recognised or supported in New Zealand's policy and funding environment. In this article, I reflect on my personal experience of redesigning the Whanau Ara Mua…

There has been little examination of how criminological theory may help to inform library practice in correctional settings. This article takes steps to address this deficit by presenting a new and timely approach to prison library research. It suggests that situating prison library research within the disciplines of librarianship, education and…

Mobile technology is now ubiquitous in families' lives and, as such, provides fertile ground for organic technology learning embedded within everyday home practices, like oral storytelling. This article explores the experiences of three Latinx women participating in a family digital storytelling program held at an East Los Angeles Head Start…

Compositional effects of scholarly culture classroom/school climate on civic knowledge scores of 9th graders in the United States were examined using the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) 1999 Civic Education Study data. Following Evans et al. (2010, 2014), we conceived that the number of books at home,…

Twice in the preschool/pre-k year, we assessed 37 Chinese 3- and 4-year-olds dual language learners' (DLLs) receptive vocabularies in English and Chinese, interviewed parents to gauge the home language environment, and videotaped classroom activities to analyze teachers' and DLLs' language use (word types) in English and Chinese. DLLs' receptive…

Despite the growing body of research on parents' beliefs and practices, relatively little is known about the relations between parents' knowledge of children's development, home-based activities, and children's early reading and math skills. This study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort to examine the differences in…

This study examines the effects of family involvement on the literacy gap between rural and urban Chinese primary students via mediation analysis. Altogether, 1080 students in Grades 1, 3, and 5 were randomly sampled from three urban and three rural primary schools from Shandong and Guizhou Provinces, representing eastern and western China,…

This experimental study explores the effects of workshops designed to increase directly the knowledge of Latinx parents, and indirectly, their children's vocabulary knowledge. Thirty-two Latinx mothers were randomly assigned to either attend six workshops in Spanish (n = 17), or to a wait-list control group (n = 15). Workshops included carefully…

Latino families face several challenges when they immigrate to the United States. School-based early childhood programs involving families with a holistic approach indicate effectiveness toward integrating both children and families into the school community. This paper explores, through informal conversations with administrators, teachers, and…