Helping Head Start Parents Promote Their Children's Kindergarten Adjustment: The Research‐Based Developmentally Informed Parent Program

Abstract

Head Start enhances school readiness during preschool, but effects diminish after children transition into kindergarten. Designed to promote sustained gains, the REDI (Research-based Developmentally Informed) Parent program (REDI-P) provided home visits before and after the kindergarten transition, giving parents evidence-based learning games, interactive stories, and guided pretend play to use with their children. To evaluate impact, 200 4-year-old children in Head Start REDI classrooms were randomly assigned to REDI-P or a comparison condition (mail-home math games). Beyond the effects of the classroom program, REDI-P promoted significant improvements in child literacy skills, academic performance, self-directed learning, and social competence, demonstrating the utility of the approach in promoting gains in cognitive and social-emotional skills evident after the transition into kindergarten.

Promoting parent academic expectations predicts improved school outcomes for low-income children entering kindergarten

“…Based on developmental research linking parent academic expectations with child academic performance (Gorard et al, 2012), it was further hypothesized that, controlling for baseline expectations and child skills, intervention effects on parent academic expectations for their children would also contribute uniquely to and mediate these positive child outcomes. Prior analyses of the REDI-P study documented significant positive intervention effects on two of the parent behaviors studied here (i.e., parent-child conversations and parent use of interactive reading strategies, ds = .27–.28) as well as significant intervention effects on kindergarten child outcomes (i.e., child literacy skills, teacher-rated academic performance, self-directed learning, and social competence; d s = .25–.29; Bierman et al, 2015), thereby providing a strong foundation for the exploration of associations between parent gains and child outcomes in the present study.…”

“…In order to support child social-emotional learning, the content of REDI-P stories and parent-child activities featured the characters and social-emotional skills introduced in the Preschool PATHS Curriculum at school, emphasizing cooperation, caring, compliments, emotional understanding, and self-control (Domitrovich et al, 2007). REDI-P provided books with embedded questions that helped parents discuss feeling words and social lessons within the stories, and also included feeling card games and compliment cards drawn from the classroom PATHS Curriculum for parents to use at home with their children (for more details, see Bierman et al, 2015). …”

“…Prior analyses demonstrated that REDI-P was successful in promoting increases in parent’s use of interactive reading strategies, d = .28, and the frequency and length of parent-child conversations, d = .27, based on parent report (Bierman et al, 2015). This study expanded on those findings in two important ways.…”

“…Encouraging parents to reflect on their success teaching their children may have enhanced parent confidence regarding their ability to help their children reach future academic goals, thereby promoting more positive academic expectations. However, this outcome was not explored in the initial outcomes study (Bierman et al, 2015). Hence, a key goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that REDI-P improved parent academic expectations, as well as to explore parent behaviors and parent academic expectations as potential mediators of intervention effects on child outcomes.…”

“…Recently, the REDI ( Re search-based D evelopmentally I nformed) Parent program (REDI-P) demonstrated that providing Head Start parents with home learning materials and support at the elementary school transition improved child outcomes in areas of kindergarten literacy skills, d = .25; teacher-rated academic performance, d = .28; self-directed learning, d = .29; and social competence, d = .28 (Bierman, Welsh, Heinrichs, Nix, & Mathis, 2015). The present study examined the impact of REDI-P on the beliefs parents had about their children’s future academic potential (their academic expectations) and explored the degree to which gains in those expectations and other key parenting behaviors mediated intervention effects on child outcomes.…”