Parent Tutoring as a Supplement to Compensatory Education for First-Grade Children

Abstract

Children identified for Chapter I compensatory education programs were randomly assigned to an experimental program in which mothers were trained in structured tutoring techniques or to a control group. Children assessed on two standardized reading tests showed statistically significant differences after 6 months, but these differences later disappeared. When analyses were limited to those pairs of children in which the parent of the experimental group child had participated more completely in the tutoring program, there were both immediate and long-term statistically significant differences between the groups. It is concluded that parent tutoring programs can be an effective supplement to compensatory education programs but a substantial number of parents do not participate in such programs. The failure to account for degree of participation in previous research on parent involvement may account for the contradictory findings often reported.