Raising the literacy levels of young children is a major concern in many countries for which various programmes have been suggested. One of these is family literacy programmes. In previous meta-analyses wide variability in effects has been found and it has been suggested that this is partly caused by variability in implementation quality. This…

Among educational researchers and practitioners, parent involvement tends to be described as a wholly positive experience, benefitting parents, teachers, and children alike. However, the author--a university professor originally from South Korea--explains that her early interactions with her son's teachers have been one-sided and fraught with…

Parental investments in the activities and materials that drive learning are central to young children's school readiness and life success. Little is known, however, about how parents adjust these investments in response to outside pressures, including their children's impending entry into kindergarten. In the present study, we employ two…

In this interview, Sharon Klein, the Head of School at St. George's School of Montreal, discusses how health and well-being are integrated in the curriculum and school life. Since its beginning in 1930, St. George's has operated on six founding principles, the first of which is "health comes first." Ms. Klein describes how this principle…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine early intervention (EI) service providers'perceptions of the roles played by fathers in services, as well as their perceptions of the barriers that limit fathers from being engaged in the services provided for families of children with disabilities. A total of 511 EI service providers…

With the national push to expand preschool education, there has been growing interest in understanding why Latino families are enrolled in preschool at lower rates than non-Latino families. This study applied the accommodations model by Meyers and Jordan (2006) to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n = 5,850) to provide a more…

Parent involvement is a concept that is used to describe the ways schools attempt to connect with parents for the educational benefit and support of students. Schools engage in strategies and invest in programs to increase parents' involvement at and with the school, employ personnel to support parents, and develop workshops aimed at supporting…

Somalis have settled in the UK in significant numbers, yet Somali children's schooling needs have been largely ignored. Only Mohamed Kahin's "Educating Somali Children in Britain" (ED430859), published in 1997, offered insights and information to those responsible for their educational provision. In this new book, completed by Professor…

The article on barriers to parental involvement in education that was published in "Educational Review" in 2011 has been surprisingly widely read and cited. The article was prompted by concern over the apparent gap between the rhetoric and reality of parental involvement evident in preceding years. It presented a model which discussed…

We live in a democracy and yet our schools are far from democratic. Decisions made by central government, implemented by headteachers and policed by Ofsted are rarely scrutinised or debated by those whose daily lives are significantly affected by them. Little surprise then that there is so much disenchantment on the part of teachers, disaffection…

Because teachers have regular access to youth, they have the potential of playing a significant role in health promotion and drug abuse prevention strategies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of training and encouraging project-based learning methods on Venezuelan teachers' attitudes toward school-based drug abuse prevention…

A cross sectional design with a qualitative approach was used to purposively sample Special Education teachers at Dzorwulu Special School (a public institution) and Reyo Paddock School (a private institution) in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Face-to-face interviews were employed, complemented with in-class observations. Four key areas…

Focusing on diversity represents a step forward towards a complex concept of quality in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) system. The diversification of programmes and services takes shape within this framework, bringing a shift from purely technical issues towards a joint construction of the community's culture. Its complexity is…

This article is the Swiss contribution to the European project 'Collaboration on Improving Students' Preparation for Family-School Partnerships'. It presents results from a study investigating how Swiss Schools of Teacher Education prepare primary school students for cooperation with the parents of four- to thirteen-year-old pupils. Nine Schools…

Debates on gentrification's effects on public education motivated two independently conducted literature reviews about (a) how the increasing presence of middle- and upper-class residents affected public schools in gentrifying communities, and (b) what were gentrification's effects on the schooling experiences of students who resided in the…