A new program that sends weekly texts to parents to remind them to engage in simple activities to boost their preschooler’s literacy skills appears to help children read. The program, called READY4K! and developed at the Stanford School of Education by education professor Susanna Loeb, PhD, and graduate student Benjamin York and tested at preschools at the San Francisco Unified School District, underwent an 8-month pilot conducted in 2013-2014. In a release describing the pilot program, Loeb described the challenges faced by parents:
The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn't knowledge or desire, but it's the crazy, busy lives... It's difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we're helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.
The program enrolled 440 parents, half of whom got literacy building tips by text and the other half got placebo announcements about the district. Parents who received literacy tips were more likely to engage in literacy activities such as reading to their children, reviewing rhyming words and playing word puzzles. Moreover, the authors note in a report that the preschool-age children scored higher on literacy assessment tests at the end of the pilot program than those whose parents had not gotten weekly texts. In the release, a representative of SFUSD notes:
I believe that all families want to be involved in their child's learning, but many feel they don't have the time or perceive that supporting their child's learning might be labor intensive or something that the teacher is better at. The texting program offered some simple nuggets around literacy strategies and validated that families do want to be involved, if given information that is easy to receive and useful.
The READY4K! program was developed with accessibility and scalability in mind. York and Loeb carefully parsed early childhood literacy standards from the state into text-size bites, with the aim that they would be helpful and not add another layer of stress to the already busy parents’ lives.
SFUSD has expanded the program this year to all preschool and kindergarten parents. Loeb and York have heard from other interested school districts and have also added early math skills into the weekly texts.
Previously: Reading, book sharing less common in immigrant families, Stanford study finds, Researcher shows how preschoolers are, quite literally, little scientists and This is your 4-year-old on cartoons
Photo by L.A. Cicero/Stanford News Service
