Coupling Early Childhood Education with Early Elementary Education

A national trend has emergedin the United Statesto couple early childhood education with early elementary school education to create a unique (new) developmental period. Such coupling is academically logical, because it reinforces gains that children make in early childhood education (Bogard & Takanishi (2005). Such coupling is also practically appropriate, because it promotes the efforts to decreasemultiple early risk factors and to increase the capacity of early intervention (National Research Council, 2001). Finally, such coupling isprogrammatically convenient (see Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2012).Kagan and Kauerz (2007) believe that such coupling helps integrate early childhood education into the formal education system so that the same standards of educational quality can be extended into early childhood education.

This critical (new) developmental period in human life span presents new challenges to policymakers, educators, and parents.To aid the search for strategies that help these parties to work together to advance a systematic and comprehensive effort to integrate early childhood education and early school success, this meta-analysis attempted to synthesize findings regarding the relationship between learning outcome and parental involvement during this critical developmental period. Although this relationship has been a popular issue among researchers with a number of review studies (e.g., Gonzalez-DeHass, Willems, & Holbein, 2005), very few research syntheses have concentrated on this critical developmental period.

Understanding Parental Involvement

We searched the literature for systematic and comprehensive frameworks that attempt to understand parental involvement.We have found that all major frameworks take root in the interface of three distinct functional contexts of families, schools, and communities asEpstein and Rodriguez-Jansorn (2004) assert “that students learn and grow at home, at school, and in their communities, and that they are influenced and assisted by their families, teachers, principals, and others in the community” (p. 20). Semke and Sheridan (2012) proposed a generalapproachto understand this interface through family involvement, family-school partnerships, and family-school-community partnerships.

Family involvement refers to theproactive engagement of parents in various activities and behaviors at home and in school that aim to promote learning and development of their children (Fantuzzo, Tighe, & Childs, 2000).Family-school partnerships particularly emphasizethe critical importance of open communication, healthy relationships, mutual respects, and genuine willingness to share power between families and schools (Henderson, Mapp, Johnson, & Davies, 2007).Family-school-community partnerships aim to tap into variouscommunity resources to offer programs and services that support child development at home and in school (Tough, 2008).

Concerning family involvement, we sought further for frameworks with a fuller set of indicators of emphases on the part of parents. Ho and Willms (1996) proposed four general dimensions of family involvement to describe the behaviors of parents that facilitate child development. Home discussion engages parents and children to plan for school matters. Home supervision depicts parents’ effort to regulate activities at home after school. Home-school connection establishes a channel of communication for parents to contact schools. School participation indicates that parents volunteer in school events.

Another framework that describes the role of parents (i.e., family involvement) comes from Grolnick and Slowiaczek (1994) who theorized three types of family involvement. Behavioral involvement provides information useful for parents to help children’s schooling. Personal involvement helps develop and refine the affective characteristics of children in order for them to develop positive attitudes towards self and education. Finally, intellectual involvement exposes children to cognitively challenging activities that stimulate children to reach for a higher level of cognition.

Our meta-analysis applied the three frameworks of partnerships among families, schools, and communities (Epstein et al., 2009) and the two frameworks of family involvement (Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994; Ho & Willms, 1996) to code empirical studies.

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