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

说明(由申请人提供)：公共支持低收入儿童发展的努力，如Head Start和第一标题，往往包括家庭教育参与的部分，鼓励家庭与教育工作者合作。这类计划隐含着这样的假设，即家庭参与儿童教育将有助于降低发展风险。然而，这些家庭参与的努力依赖于有限的科学知识基础。这项拟议的研究有两个目的：(1)考察家庭内部在早期阶段教育投入的稳定性和变化模式，提供家庭参与动态的发展模型；(2)检查早期教育投入与儿童成绩和社会情绪功能之间的关系(例如，家庭间累计投入的差异是否预示着儿童之间的成绩差异？)以及家庭内部(例如，当一个家庭的参与度增加时，儿童的成绩是否会有所改善？)拟议的研究将使用390名低收入儿童及其家庭的现有纵向数据(即从出生到五年级)，这些儿童及其家庭参与了儿童综合发展计划(CCDP)和学校过渡研究(STS)的影响评估。这些纵向数据的个人增长模型将被用来检查家庭内部的变化模式和家庭之间的差异。拟议研究的科学贡献将是更多地了解教育参与对家庭和学校环境变化的敏感程度，以及儿童的发展对参与变化的敏感程度。因此，这项研究将有助于回答哪些家庭可能在什么时候和什么情况下参与其子女的教育，以及这种参与可能促进低收入儿童的发展。调查结果也将与公共卫生有关，通过指导干预工作，针对最有可能增加低收入家庭家庭教育参与度的机制，从而改善儿童的成就和社会情绪功能，并确定最有可能对干预努力作出积极反应的儿童和家庭，从而帮助提高低收入家庭儿童健康发展的几率。

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.