The effects of a community-based literacy program: One-year follow-up findings

Abstract

Researchers have become increasingly concerned about whether behaviors that have been successfully changed through intervention programs are maintained after completion of the intervention. Project PRIMER (Producing Infant/Mother Ethnic Readers) is a community-based program designed to teach low-income parents techniques for promoting literacy at home. The initial effects of Project PRIMER were that parents who were assigned to the intervention group increased their literacy behaviors significantly more than parents in the control group, and children in the experimental group had significantly higher language production and conceptual development scores than children in the control group. Follow-up data were collected one year after the intervention was completed to determine whether the behaviors modeled to the parents were maintained and whether children in the intervention and control groups still differed in their tests scores. One hundred ninety-four of the 277 participating families were located one year later. Few of the significant differences initially produced were maintained. These results suggest that booster sessions are necessary to maintain changes in both parents and their children. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.