Words to go!: Evaluating a first‐grade parent involvement program for “making” words at home

Abstract

Parents make powerful contributions to their children's early literacy learning in school. The purpose of this study was to design, implement, and evaluate the efficacy of the Words to Go parent involvement program as part of a larger effort to reach out to parents in early literacy. Quantitative data from surveys and qualitative data from focus group meetings were collected about the Words‐to‐Go program and demonstrated moderate to highly favorable perceptions among parents, teachers, and students. A pretest post test comparison of first‐graders’ word reading, word writing ability and criterion‐referenced reading test performance in two matched elementary schools showed significant effects favoring the Words‐to‐Go program participants.