Date of Conferral
2021
Degree
Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)
School
Education
Advisor
Billie Andersson
Abstract
AbstractFamily engagement in schooling has academic benefits for students and has been cited in decreasing the achievement gap. Half of all study district first-grade students did not meet benchmark goals on continuous text reading assessments. Further, first-grade treatment school students performed below published benchmarks on measures of sight word identification fluency (WIF). The purpose of this study was to examine changes to WIF scores after participation in the Families and Schools Together in Academic Partnerships (FAST-AP) pilot and to examine the effect of parent participation on changes to continuous text reading scores. Emergent literacy and sociocultural learning theories provided the theoretical basis for this study. Research questions examined changes in WIF and continuous text reading scores after participation in FAST-AP using descriptive and causal comparative approaches. Nonprobability purposive sampling was used to identify 70 first-grade students attending two schools in a suburban Title I district in the Northeastern United States to provide archival data. Mean growth for timed (n = 34, M = 34.18) and untimed (n = 33, M = 67.58) WIF scores exceeded the established benchmark (M = 31.5). One sample t-tests indicated timed WIF growth was not statistically significant, while untimed growth reached statistical significance [t(32) = 8.89, p < .001, d = 1.55]. An independent samples t-test indicated no significant difference between the continuous text reading scores of students whose families participated in FAST-AP (n = 39) and those who did not (n = 31). Study results suggest a positive effect of FAST-AP participation on WIF. This study may exert positive social change by providing a strategy that emphasizes collaborative family-school interactions to empower families in supporting foundational literacy skills and improvements in literacy achievement.
Recommended Citation
Reynolds, Kathleen S., "Families and Schools Together in Academic Partnerships and Student Literacy Achievement" (2021). Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies. 10749.
https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/10749
