Empowering Parents and Improving Reading: Investigating an Intervention for Adolescent Readers

Abstract

Home school partnerships focused on recreational reading can improve outcomes for students. There is a body of literature which suggests parental involvement can be beneficial to student outcomes. Similarly there is a great deal of research on the importance of reading to children’s learning. This study sits at the nexus between these two discourses. The setting was a decile seven co-educational public secondary school in suburban Auckland. It was a two-phase study which sought to both better understand how schools and parents can work together to achieve common goals, and to find ways to improve students’ recreational reading habits. The first phase of the research surveyed 54 parents of Year 9 students to establish their beliefs, attitudes and current practices concerning their support for their children’s reading. Key findings from this survey were that rates of use for strategies to support reading at home were low. There was also a perception that the importance of developing reading skills had increased while the role of parents in supporting that development had decreased. The second phase was an intervention involving eight families from the same school. The intervention had two important features. Firstly, a framework was developed and used to align reading strategies to the individual requirements of each family. Secondly, participants were involved in co-constructing the intervention they used at home with their child. The overall research design used a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, applied to working with families rather than teachers. The first phase collected data from parents via a questionnaire. The second phase collected six different sources of data: pre- and postintervention questionnaires, research journals, workshop notes, meeting notes, and emails and other correspondence. These were used to form case study narratives which were then coded using a mixture of deductive and inductive analysis. This intervention was informed by two theoretical frames. The first of these was a parental involvement frame which created bespoke, collaborative and sustained interventions. The second frame used the categories of accessing texts, promoting engagement in texts and modelling of a positive disposition towards reading, to align reading strategies to the needs of individual participants. There were three central findings of the intervention. Firstly, the results suggest that parents can be empowered to increase the strategies used at home to help support their children’s learning. Secondly, reading habits can be developed. All families made progress towards reaching the goals they set for themselves and five of eight families reached their goal by the end of the ten-week intervention period. This included reluctant readers increasing their volume of, and interest in, reading. All families who completed the intervention intended to continue with their focus on reading at home post-intervention. Thirdly, there were also positive benefits for parent and child relationships reported along with positive effects on siblings who were not the focus of the intervention. The results provide two important frameworks for helping to align school and home practices. These frameworks offer flexibility to be deployed in a wide range of education settings to help schools achieve their goals.