Children’s home reading under parental supervision can supplement in-class reading. A paper published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness investigated the effects of a one-year parental involvement intervention on the development of primary school children’s reading skills.

The researchers adopted school-level cluster randomization and recruited 600 grade-2 students from Tanzania (n=12 experimental schools, 264 students ; 12 control schools, 336 students). Groups were similar in terms of in child gender, parent gender, parental educational level, and parental income. The intervention incorporated four parts: training sessions for teachers and parents; parents’ and children’s shared reading at home; partnership between parents and teachers; and parental involvement in children’s homework.

Outcomes of interest included three dimensions of reading achievement: word decoding, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Results showed significant enhancement in word decoding, reading fluency, and reading comprehension at the end of the one-year intervention. A follow-up assessment 8 months after the intervention showed sustainable improvement in decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension. This research reinforces the importance of parental involvement in children’s literacy development. The researchers also suggest that good teacher-parent partnership could elicit stronger effects.