Parents and Children Working Together

Parents and Children Working Together

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Tandem Project

Parents and Children Working Together

Siné McDougall, Ruth Krascum and Daphne Evans

University of Wales Swansea

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Paper presented at the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme, First Annual Conference - University of Leicester, November 2000

In recent years the government has emphasised its commitment to early years education and childcare. In particular, the government has expressed the aim of involving more parents in their children’s education. The Tandem Project is an 18-month project being carried out under the Surestart initiative in partnership with Swansea City and County Council. The Surestart initiative is aimed specifically at families with children under the age of four and focuses on areas identified by the Local Education Authority has having the greatest deprivation. The Surestart vision pivots on the idea of greater integration between planners, regulators and providers. The Tandem Project seeks to reinforce the value of an integrated approach. It is our view that in terms of early education, the pledge of integrated working can best be achieved through a partnership between educational practice and psychological research which in turn can be used to benefit both parents and their young children.

The project is based on the common observation made by teachers that when children enter school there are considerable differences in their readiness to acquire basic curriculum skills. Such early differences may well be attributable to the types of learning opportunities that parents provide for their children. In many homes, parents spontaneously encourage their children to learn, through such methods as reading stories to them, or teaching them letters and numbers. However, many children do not have this advantage. Either their parents had a poor educational experience themselves or they do not realise the importance of taking an active role in their child’s schooling. Thus, whereas it is laudable for the government to suggest that parents become active partners in their children’s learning and school experience, it is important to equip parents with the skills that will enable them to do so.

The Tandem Project aims to develop ways that parents can assist their pre-schoolers to acquire the basic capabilities thought crucial to the early development of literacy and numeracy and, hence, to prepare them for formal schooling. In this project we are liasing with parents of 3-year-old children who have not yet started school and encouraging them to play simple games with their children that are designed to teach important concepts about words and numbers. This involves not only informing parents about activities they can do with their children but also providing them with the confidence and enthusiasm to carry the project through. The latter are seen as vital elements in the project, and maintaining good contact with parents to reassure and encourage them is a key consideration in determining how the project is carried out. Importantly, the Tandem Project concentrates its efforts in developing home-based literacy and numeracy programmes for pre-school children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The important issues raised by this project are as follows: -

  • The need to recognise, and deal practically with, the fact that children differ widely in their abilities and skills on entry to school.
  • The need to provide parents with effective methods of preparing their children for formal education.
  • The need to provide better support to parents from disadvantaged areas as they may be less well equipped to help their children.

Background information

The efficacy of home-based literacy instruction.

As pointed out by Dickenson (1994), recent years have shown a strong interest in ‘emergent literacy’, meaning, “the cluster of behaviours involving uses of print and oral language that appear during the preschool years. These behaviours make clear the fact that, prior to formal literacy instruction, children are constructing literacy-related knowledge.” For example, pre-school children reared in literacy-rich environments may display ‘pretend’ readings of books and ‘scribble writing’.

There has been extensive investigation of the effects on child literacy of storybook reading carried out at home by parents. A vast amount of evidence spanning more than a decade of research has now been amassed to show a beneficial outcome in terms of children’s vocabulary acquisition, knowledge of syntax, and awareness of such aspects of written language as orthographic and phonological structure (e.g., Baker et al., 1996; Mason & Kerr, 1992; Neuman, 1996; Porterfield Stewart, 1995; Weinberger, 1996). Children also benefit greatly if their parents provide direct instruction about reading-related skills (Anbar, 1986; Briggs & Elkind, 1977; Durkin, 1966; Jackson, Donaldson, and Cleland, 1988).

The efficacy of home-based numeracy instruction.

In contrast to the widespread interest in fostering literacy-related skills, there has been virtually no attention paid to whether early interventions can have a beneficial effect on young children’s numeracy. However, recent years have begun to see some discussion in the educational literature of the idea of ‘emergent mathematics’ (e.g., Atkinson, 1992; Cook, 1996), largely stimulated by growing evidence that children do begin to acquire some mathematical concepts before they commence formal schooling (Fuson, 1987; Aubry, 1993; Munn, 1994, 1995). A study by Cook (1996) demonstrated that it was possible to stimulate the development of basic numeracy in nursery children using dramatic play in the nursery setting. Such findings suggest that games played with children at home by their parents could similarly facilitate children’s acquisition of number concepts. To date, however, there has been no investigation of this issue.

Parents’ attitudes towards home teaching according to socio-economic background.

While the benefits of home-based literacy instruction for young children have been widely reported, there are a number of reasons to anticipate that the success of such instruction may depend crucially on parents’ attitudes towards, and their abilities in, home teaching. For example, parents may not think that their children can learn any important academic skills at home or they may not believe that learning can be enjoyable (Holloway et al., 1995; Spencer, 1986). Such attitudes may come about if parents had a poor educational experience themselves (Handel and Goldsmith, 1994). Even if parents do want to provide home tutoring, they may lack confidence in their ability to help their children to learn (Toomey & Sloan, 1994). Alternatively, given a set of structured academic exercises, parents may not understand the aims or the relevance of the various tasks (Macleod, 1996). Consequently, children from middle-class homes are much more likely to be taught literacy-related skills by their parents than are children from disadvantaged homes (e.g., Nicholson, 1997; Snow, 1994).

Method

Participants

The children participating in the study are all aged between 3 years 0 months and 3 years 6 months and they have not yet started school. Although the majority are from disadvantaged backgrounds in terms of socio-economic status we have also included participants from non-deprived areas to provide comparative data.

The performance of three groups of children is compared: -

  1. PARENT GROUP. Participants in this group receive the support programme from their parents.
  1. NURSERY GROUP. Participants in this group receive the support programme from an intermediary (the project worker).
  1. CONTROL GROUP. Participants in this group receive the support programme only following the post-test measures.

The comparison groups are matched in terms of age, gender and socio-economic background.

Procedure

Developing a partnership with parents

Our first task is to involve schools and parents in the project, outlining the proposal and seeking their support. This is seen as essential to develop a partnership between educational practice and psychological research.

The next task is to discuss with parents how the use of simple games, developed to enhance pre-literacy and numeracy, could help their children at the very start of the educational process. We provide the games and instructions but allow parents some flexibility in how the games are used. An important aspect of the project is its goal to solicit feedback from the parents about which aspects of the games they feel are either successful or problematic and one of the researchers meets with parents on a regular basis to answer their questions and offer advice and encouragement. Parents are also asked to complete a journal each week, describing how the child performed with each activity and any difficulties that were encountered.

The intervention

Parents and children then participate in a six-week programme of activities that are designed to introduce basic concepts about number and reading via games and stories. There are twelve activities and children are given four activities per week. Some activities are repeated over the six-week period and others are presented in two stages of graded difficulty. Crucially, the child’s progress determines whether and when they receive the more difficult activities. The games include: - reading together, learning relational terms (for size, length and amount), discrimination between shapes, learning nursery rhymes, counting (with and without objects), matching written labels with various common household objects, listening to words that start or end with the same sound, and learning about conservation (using liquids). These activities are designed to develop skills that previous research has indicated are precursors to literacy and numeracy. For example, the ‘reading together’ game uses colour coding of pictures and text such that children are taught the representational properties of written words and the difference between words and pictures. By breaking the learning-to-read process into more manageable pre-literacy structures, we hope that children’s learning will be facilitated.

Pre- and post-intervention evaluation of skills

To evaluate the effectiveness of the programme, baseline measures and two post-intervention measures are obtained of each child's skills. The first post-test is carried out one week after the completion of the intervention (in the week before the children start school) and the second post-test is carried out six weeks after the completion of the intervention (thus, after children have commenced formal schooling). These measures include the British Picture Vocabulary Scale, skills associated with reading ability (e.g., knowledge of letters, words and sounds as well as rhyme and shape discrimination), and skills associated with numerical ability (e.g. understanding relational terms for amounts, conservation, number recognition, counting skills, and knowledge about counting principles such as the cardinal principle and the order-irrelevance principle). The measures used in the baseline and post-intervention assessments are related to, but not the same as, the tasks used in the intervention itself.

Results

Data is being collected in a series of tranches throughout the 18-month period of the study. We have recently completed the first tranche in which 29 (out of the total of 120) children were recruited to the study. Fifteen of the children were taught by their parents, 12 were taught in nurseries, and 2 were not given the intervention. Since there are so few children currently in the control group, our initial analyses has focused on those in the Parent and Nursery groups.

Cognitive skills

Analyses of variance were carried out to examine the effectiveness of the intervention (before versus after), group differences (Parent versus Nursery groups), and possible interactions between these variables for each measure. Our findings are summarised in Table 1. This table shows that there were statistically reliable improvements in a large number of skills after the intervention had taken place. For numeracy skills these included awareness of the concepts of more/less and bigger/smaller, the ability to count (this improved from counting up to 2 or 3 initially to 7 or 8 after the intervention), counting appropriately using objects, and number recognition (although children could still only recognise 1 or 2 numbers on average). For literacy skills, improvements were primarily in pre-literacy tasks such as shape discrimination (prior to recognising letters), implicit rhyme awareness, and pre-writing skills (i.e. development of mark-making skills). Tasks such as explicit rhyme awareness and letter and word recognition have yet to develop. We hope to measure these later literacy skills at the second post-test once children have commenced formal schooling.

If we consider children's percentage scores across all tasks we can see that the interaction between intervention effects and group differences is approaching significance (p=0.053). This reflects the fact that in some of the tasks the improvement shown by the Nursery children is less than that shown by those in the Parent group. The tasks on which the Parent group showed the greater improvement were shape discrimination (p = 0.03) and writing (p = 0.003). The interaction between time and group also approaches significance for number recognition (p = 0.06).

Perceptions of parents and children

All the children who were tested in our initial baseline assessment went on to complete the 6-week intervention and the first post-test. The fact that there was no sample attrition testifies to the children's enjoyment of the 'games' they were asked to play to develop their pre-reading and numeracy skills.

Parents' responses to the intervention were very positive, as shown by the following comments: -

"X has learnt to counter better and she especially likes the nursery rhymes."

"The best part was it helped me how to teach X to learn about different things."

Learned how to "spot differences and helps to concentrate"

Enjoyed "quality time spent together"

Enjoyed "having some quiet time to learn the tasks with her, especially as she listened to me for a change!"

These comments make it clear that both parents and children see their time with the Tandem Project as a positive experience and that the parents feel they have gained useful knowledge about how to help their children learn. Such perceptions appear to have motivated parents because they felt they were really contributing to their child's development. In addition, many parents gained some insight into how the games worked to produce an improvement in their child’s skills and they were eager to continue with these activities even when the formal intervention had finished.

Conclusions

Though we are in the early stages of the project, the initial results have been most encouraging. It is our belief that the approach can be used to develop more effective means of raising educational performance in three ways. First, to inform teachers and others involved in the education system of the developments from psychological research. Second, to develop structured play interventions to encourage children to learn. Third, to demonstrate to parents how seemingly simple activities can provide the basis for pre-literacy and numeracy. Importantly, the methodology encourages parents to become more involved in their children's learning, which we hope will motivate both adult and child to continue to enjoy the teaching and learning process after the intervention is over.

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Table 1: Means (and standard deviations) of children's performance when taught by parents or in the nursery

Parents / Nursery
Task / Max. Score / Before / After / Before / After / Difference due to intervention? / Difference between parents & nursery groups? / Interaction between 'time' and group?
British Picture Vocabulary Scale / - / 35.67
(4.01) / - / 34.92
(3.72) / - / - / - / -
Awareness of size/amount / 6 / 4.25
(1.24) / 5.80
(0.41) / 3.92
(1.44) / 5.83
(0.58) / 0.000 / 0.522 / 0.382
Conservation and awareness of number relations / 0.67
(0.82) / 0.73
(0.70) / 0.58
(0.90) / 1.00
(0.60) / 0.294 / 0.637 / 0.445
Counting up to ...(no objects) / 10+ / 2.60
(3.91) / 7.27
(2.67) / 3.83
(3.27) / 7.58
(2.84) / 0.000 / 0.429 / 0.570
Counting up to ... (objects) / 8 / 4.27
(2.63) / 6.93
(4.23) / 5.25
(2.93) / 6.58
(2.67) / 0.022 / 0.841 / 0.279
Number recognition / 5 / 0.44
(0.96) / 2.27
(1.49) / 0.75
(1.76) / 1.18
(1.89) / 0.007 / 0.463 / 0.060
Implicit rhyme awareness / 6 / - / 2.83
(1.34) / - / 2.73
(2.41) / - / - / -
Explicit rhyme awareness / 8 / 0.21
(0.58) / 0.47
(1.06) / 0.33
(1.09) / 0.58
(1.38) / 0.341 / 0.707 / 0.949
Shape discrimination / 4 / 0.81
(1.25) / 3.27
(1.22) / 2.00
(1.48) / 3.20
(1.23) / 0.000 / 0.212 / 0.030
Letter recognition / 0.19
(0.54) / 0.67
(0.93) / 1.33
(1.50) / 0.92
(1.56) / 0.928 / 0.121 / 0.122
Word Recognition / 16 / 0.00
- / 0.67
(0.26) / 0.00
- / 0.00
- / - / - / -
Writing / 5 / 0.46
(0.78) / 1.77
(1.17) / 0.60
(0.97) / 1.00
(1.28) / 0.009 / 0.071 / 0.003
Total percentage score / 100 / 21.44
(9.81) / 44.06
(12.06) / 24.41
(6.67) / 42.85
(10.96) / 0.000 / 0.831 / 0.053

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References

Anbar, A. (1986). Reading acquisition of preschool children without systematic instruction. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 1, 69-83.

Atkinson, S. (1992). Mathematics with reason! The emergent approach to primary maths. London, Hodder and Stoughton.

Aubry, C. (1993). An investigation of the mathematical competences which young children bring into school. British Educational Research Journal, 19, 19-39.

Baker, L., Allen, J., Shockley, B., Pellegrini, A. D., Galda, L., & Stahl, S. (1996). Connecting school and home: Constructing partnerships to foster reading development. In L. Baker, P. Afflerbach, & D. Reinking (Eds.), Developing engaged readers in school and home communities (pp. 21-41). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Briggs, C., & Elkind, D. (1977). Characteristics of early readers. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 44, 1231-1237.

Cook, D. (1996). Mathematical sense making and role play in the nursery. Early Child Development and Care, 121, 55-66.

Dickenson, D. K. (1994). Epilogue: What next? In D. K. Dickenson (Ed.), Bridges to literacy: Children, families and schools (pp. 285-289). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Durkin, D. (1966). Children who read early. New York: Teachers College Press.

Fuson, K. C. (1987). Children’s counting and concepts of number. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Handel, R. D., & Goldsmith, E. (1994). Family reading – still got it: Adults as learners, literacy resources, and actors in the world. In D. K. Dickenson (Ed.), Bridges to literacy: Children, families and schools (pp. 150-174). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.