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Parents as tutors of their own children: Effects of reading strategies on third-grade students
Abstract
The study was designed to investigate the effects of a parent intervention training program and its impact on reading achievement at the third grade level. Parents of grade three students in a suburban community west of Boston, Massachusetts were trained to use specific reading strategies to tutor their own children. The study attempted to show what would result when parents were trained as tutors to deliver specific oral reading strategies such as: (a) correcting miscues only when they disrupt meaning and after waiting for the child to self-correct; (b) using sustaining cues to encourage the child to use context to identify words; and (c) praising the child for self-correcting and using context. Parents participated in three training sessions that lasted approximately two hours each. Learning materials used were distributed at these meetings. As a screening procedure and to provide a standardized measure of instructional levels (pre-test and post-test) the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test Level 3, Forms K and L, were administered to students in the parent intervention group and to their classmates as control subjects. Students whose parents participated in the parent intervention training program showed significantly more gain in reading scores than did their classmates (t = 13.50, P $<$.05). A second phase of the study involved using a thirty-item questionnaire to survey about one hundred parents of third grade students to identify their attitudes about parental involvement. Parents indicated that it was the responsibility of the school to help parents to increase students' reading achievement. They also wanted the school system to continue to provide programs to meet the needs of students at all levels of learning ability and to put more effort into this goal. The findings in this study suggest that a parent involvement program using individually prescribed, meaning focused activities for teaching reading was an effective means of improving reading comprehension skills of third grade students.
Subject Area
Literacy|Reading instruction|Elementary education
Recommended Citation
MacDonald, Carol Ann, "Parents as tutors of their own children: Effects of reading strategies on third-grade students" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9434509.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9434509