Benefits and Constraints of Parent Involvement in Children’s Reading Promotion: General Research Trends and Evidence from a Swiss Paired Reading Intervention Study

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the benefits and constraints of parent involvement in children's reading promotion. The first part reviews the existing literature about the effectiveness of parent involvement in reading programs and identifies general trends of research findings. Given the fact that empirical evidence about the effectiveness of reading programs with parents is rather vague, usually lacking information about implementation fidelity, some explorative investigations about factors that might explain training success are presented in the second part. The investigations are based on data from a Swiss Paired Reading study where implementation fidelity was exhaustively examined. Children with very big gain (n = 20) and very little gain (n = 17) in reading fluency were compared regarding diverse aspects: child characteristics, parent characteristics (family background), and implementation factors. Results reveal that children benefiting from the reading program attached higher importance to reading in general, they read more in spare time and they reported higher effort during the training. The number of books at home also revealed to be a determinant factor. Yet, implementation factors gave no reason for explaining differences in improvement. The study discusses beneficial circumstances of parent involvement in reading programs.