Language-savvy parents improve their children’s reading development, study shows

Young children learning to read and write English often need to identify patterns in words to be able to read and spell them. For example, knowing the “Magic E” syllable pattern can allow a child to understand why an E at the end of a word like “rate” significantly alters the word’s sound from “rat.”

Also, knowing that the words “one” and “two” are irregularly spelled helps prevent the child from trying to sound out the underlying sounds when seeing the word in print.

Parents who understand such language complexity — what is known as reading-related knowledge — are able to spot the difficulties and explain them. They also tend to pass on those skills when they listen to their children read, which in turn helps reading development.

These are among the findings of a new study, published in the Journal of Research in Reading, by two researchers from Concordia’s Department of Education. They report that parents with higher reading-related knowledge are not only more likely to have children with higher reading scores but are also more attentive when those children read out loud to them.

The value of feedback

Seventy sets of six- and seven-year-old children and their parents participated in the study. The children were administered reading tests and were then provided with reading material at a level just above their performance level. This extra difficulty was intentional, as it provided opportunities for the parents to step in and lend a hand.

The parents were instructed to help their children as they normally would while their children read to them. The sessions were videotaped, transcribed and coded for evidence of parents’ verbal and non-verbal feedback.

“We were interested in looking at two forms of feedback,” says Aviva Segal, who co-wrote the paper as part of her now-completed PhD with her supervisor, Sandra Martin-Chang, associate professor of education. “The first was commenting on how the child was doing, the second was measuring how the parent responded when the child hesitated or made a mistake.”

The results confirmed their beliefs that parents with higher reading-related knowledge offered more praise and less criticism to their children than parents with lower reading-related knowledge. They also found that parents with a better ear for language tried to explain the relations between graphemes (letters and letter patterns) and phonemes (the smallest sounds of spoken language) to their children more often.

“We found that reading-related knowledge in parents is associated with a good ‘tag-team’ of feedback,” Segal says. “Parents with higher reading-related knowledge tend to give more praise, which sustains children throughout their learning, while at the same time they more often teach their children critical connections they need in order to read.”

The learning was not all one-way, Segal notes. She says there were incidents when parents appeared to learn something about language while their children made mistakes reading to them.

“The parents sometimes seemed to have an ‘aha!’ moment, when they realized that their children were consistently stumbling on one particular obstacle. In essence, when they were able to make sense of some of the errors their children were making, parents noted their children’s errors were the result of the language’s trickiness and not the fault of the children,” she reports.

“So, through these exchanges, parents might have been increasing their own reading-related knowledge based on what their children were displaying.”

Lessons for teachers

This study has significant classroom implications as well.

“Reading-related knowledge is an important tool that many schools of education gloss over. This can lead teachers to provide negative feedback and criticism, which can cause self-doubt in children and discourage them from taking risks,” says Martin-Chang.

“Teachers with high reading-related knowledge are often more positive and better equipped to offer precise feedback to their students. They have a sense of how hard it is for the child,” she adds.

“Being able to target the right skills while at the same time praising the child’s efforts will make the classroom a more positive setting. This can be achieved through increasing teachers’ reading-related knowledge, which is a core focus of our training at Concordia.”

Segal and Martin-Chang both believe parents should be encouraged to play with language and to pay attention to its characteristics.

“Have fun with it. Listen to song lyrics with your 7-year-old and figure out what rhymes,” urges Martin-Chang.

“Even at the dinner table, play with words that start with the same sounds. When you do this, be sensitive and positive because these fun bonding interactions can become especially powerful.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Concordia University. Original written by Patrick Lejtenyi. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Aviva Segal, Sandra Martin‐Chang. ‘What does an O say when there’s no E at the end?’ Parents’ reading‐related knowledge and feedback during child‐to‐parent reading. Journal of Research in Reading, 2019; 42 (2): 349 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9817.12272

School administrators needing to trim budgets often look first to music courses, because the general belief is that students who devote time to music rather than math, science and English, will underperform in those disciplines.

“Our research proved this belief wrong and found the more the students engage with music, the better they do in those subjects,” said UBC education professor and the study’s principal investigator, Peter Gouzouasis. “The students who learned to play a musical instrument in elementary and continued playing in high school not only score significantly higher, but were about one academic year ahead of their non-music peers with regard to their English, mathematics and science skills, as measured by their exam grades, regardless of their socioeconomic background, ethnicity, prior learning in mathematics and English, and gender.”

Gouzouasis and his team examined data from all students in public schools in British Columbia who finished Grade 12 between 2012¬ and 2015. The data sample, made up of more than 112,000 students, included those who completed at least one standardized exam for math, science, and English, and for whom the researchers had appropriate demographic information — including gender, ethnicity, neighborhood socioeconomic status, and prior learning in numeracy and literacy skills. Students who studied at least one instrumental music course in the regular curriculum counted as students taking music. Qualifying music courses are courses that require previous instrumental music experience and include concert band, conservatory piano, orchestra, jazz band, concert choir and vocal jazz.

The researchers found the predictive relationships between music education and academic achievement were more pronounced for those who took instrumental music rather than vocal music. The findings suggest skills learned in instrumental music transfer very broadly to the students’ learning in school.

“Learning to play a musical instrument and playing in an ensemble is very demanding,” said the study’s co-investigator Martin Guhn, an assistant professor in UBC’s school of population and public health. “A student has to learn to read music notation, develop eye-hand-mind coordination, develop keen listening skills, develop team skills for playing in an ensemble and develop discipline to practice. All those learning experiences, and more, play a role in enhancing the learner’s cognitive capacities, executive functions, motivation to learn in school, and self-efficacy.”

The researchers hope that their findings are brought to the attention of students, parents, teachers and administrative decision-makers in education, as many school districts over the years have emphasized numeracy and literacy at the cost of other areas of learning, particularly music.

“Often, resources for music education — including the hiring of trained, specialized music educators, and band and stringed instruments — are cut or not available in elementary and secondary schools so that they could focus on math, science and English,” said Gouzouasis. “The irony is that music education — multiple years of high-quality instrumental learning and playing in a band or orchestra or singing in a choir at an advanced level — can be the very thing that improves all-around academic achievement and an ideal way to have students learn more holistically in schools.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Martin Guhn, Scott D. Emerson, Peter Gouzouasis. A population-level analysis of associations between school music participation and academic achievement.. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2019; DOI: 10.1037/edu0000376

The exact answer probably depends on the person, but most people could agree on some general themes: good physical and mental health, solid relationships, and a steady job or good education. Being financially responsible and involvement in your community or civic life also help make life better.

Now University of Washington researchers have found that that “good life” in adulthood can start in grade school, by teaching parents and teachers to build stronger bonds with their children, and to help children form greater attachments to family and school. In a study of more than 800 adults throughout their 30s — a group the researchers have followed since they were fifth-graders at Seattle elementary schools in 1985 — the people who reported better health and socioeconomic status were, consistently, those whose parents and teachers had received lessons aimed at building stronger bonds with their children decades ago.

The researchers know of no other study of a program provided during elementary school that has followed participants for this long. Participants in the longitudinal study, known as the Seattle Social Development Project, have responded to surveys over the years about health, lifestyle, even the parenting of their own kids. Such research requires participants who will stick with a study over a big stretch of their lives, and nearly 90% of them have done just that.

The latest study involved coming up with broad measures of health and functioning in adulthood, surveying participants on specific issues related to those measures, and comparing participants whose teachers and parents received the bonding interventions during elementary school with those who didn’t.

“These early elementary-school interventions seek to make kids’ current lives better both in and out of school,” said Rick Kosterman, a principal investigator with the Social Development Research Group, part of the UW School of Social Work. “But can we actually get kids on a different life trajectory that lasts beyond elementary school? In fact, we found enduring effects, where they’re having an overall better experience in adulthood.”

The prevention curriculum, called Raising Healthy Children, was created by UW social work professors J. David Hawkins and Richard Catalano. The lessons, for use by parents and teachers, focused on enhancing children’s opportunities for forming healthy bonds in grades 1 through 6 and providing them with social skills and reinforcements. Teachers and parents of children in some classrooms of the 18 participating Seattle elementary schools used the curriculum in the 1980s, while those in other classrooms did not have access to it.

Dr. Rudolf Druikers child psychologist and basis for Ethos Logos character program.

Many of the concepts are teaching tools and parenting tips that are well-known today: reinforcing positive behaviors; setting expectations for making responsible choices; and promoting positive social interaction at school through group projects and seating arrangements. Table groups in the classroom facilitate cooperation and learning from one another, for example, while at home, parents can “catch” their child being good and offer praise. With older children, parents can discuss issues such as smoking so that standards for healthy behavior are established before the teen years.

For the new follow-up study, published in late spring in Prevention Science, Kosterman devised a list of nine measurable aspects of life for people in their 30s: physical health; mental health; health maintenance behaviors (such as exercise and sleep); low sex-risk behavior; low rates of substance abuse; friendships and relationships; socioeconomic status (income, education, homeownership); responsibility (employment, managing finances); and civic engagement. The team then used surveys and in-person physical evaluations to determine participants’ health and successful functioning in adult life.

In a comprehensive test of effects that combined all nine indicators of a healthy and successful adult life, those from intervention classrooms when in elementary school reported significantly better outcomes than those from comparison classrooms through their 30s. Specific areas of significant improvement included fewer symptoms of mental health disorders, more engagement in health maintenance behaviors, and overall better health and socioeconomic success. On the remaining measures, the intervention group scored better on each one, though not as dramatically, compared with the control group.

It’s hard to attribute results that manifest decades later directly to the curriculum, said Hawkins, a co-author on the new study. But the changed behaviors of their teachers and parents during the elementary grades likely had a snowball effect, leading to positive relationships and responsible decision-making in adulthood.

“We worked to build healthier relationships — we call it social bonding — between teachers and students, and parents and children. The larger question was, if we do all these things, will it turn into a prosocial, healthy lifestyle?” Hawkins said. “We didn’t know we would see these results so much later in life.”

In analyzing the data, researchers examined factors that tend to negatively affect health outcomes: whether a child grew up in poverty, was raised by a single parent, or born to a teenager. Participants who were born to a mother under age 20 were found to have a substantially lower quality of life on several of the measures, especially in the areas of socioeconomic status, physical health and substance abuse. The intervention effects the researchers found persisted even after controlling for these effects of being born to a teen mother.

“The most important thing we’ve learned is to provide opportunities for kids to have positive social involvement,” Hawkins said. “Make sure your kids have the opportunity to engage with you as a parent. Play with them, hold them; don’t just sit on your phone when you’re with them.

“When kids feel bonded to you, they’re less likely to violate your expectations. And you are likely to be setting them up to have better lives long into the future.”

Kosterman and his team have applied for funding to conduct further research on the group, now in their mid-40s, in midlife. “More studies are needed that test childhood interventions and follow participants through the 30s and beyond,” Kosterman added, “but we are encouraged that these findings suggest that lasting change for important outcomes is possible.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Washington. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Rick Kosterman, J. David Hawkins, Karl G. Hill, Jennifer A. Bailey, Richard F. Catalano, Robert D. Abbott. Effects of Social Development Intervention in Childhood on Adult Life at Ages 30 to 39. Prevention Science, 2019; DOI: 10.1007/s11121-019-01023-3

University of Washington. “Decades after a good-behavior program in grade school, adults report healthier, more successful lives.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 July 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190725150403.htm>.