The Impact of Family Educational Involvement on Low-income Children's Development

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

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Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Public efforts to support the development of low-income children, such as Head Start and Title I, often include family educational involvement components, encouraging families to collaborate with educators. Implicit in such programs is the assumption that family participation in children's education will help alleviate developmental risk. Yet, these family involvement efforts have relied on a limited scientific knowledge base. The proposed study has two aims: (1) to examine within-family patterns of stability and change in educational involvement across the early school years, providing developmental models of family involvement dynamics; and (2) to examine associations between educational involvement and children's achievement and social-emotional functioning across the early school years both between-families (e.g., are between-family differences in cumulative involvement predictive of between-child differences in achievement?) and within-families (e.g., when involvement increases within a family, does child achievement improve?). The proposed study will use existing longitudinal data (i.e., from birth through the fifth grade) for 390 low-income children and their families who participated in an impact evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) and the School Transition Study (STS). Individual growth models of these longitudinal data will be used to examine within-family patterns of change and between-family differences. The scientific contribution of the proposed study will be an increased understanding of the extent to which educational involvement is sensitive to changes in family and school contexts and the extent to which children's development is, in turn, sensitive to changes in involvement. As such, this study will help answer for whom, when, and under what circumstances are families likely to get involved in their children's education and for whom, when, and under what circumstances is this involvement likely to promote the development of low-income children. Findings will also be relevant for public health, helping improve the odds of healthy development for children living in low-income families by guiding intervention efforts to target the mechanisms that are most likely to increase family educational involvement among low-income families and, thereby, improve children's achievement and social-emotional functioning as well as identifying children and families most likely to respond positively to intervention efforts. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]