This education course is a requirement for my major and I decided to enhance it. My professor was Dr. Suskind and we worked closely to develop a project that would allow me to gain the most out of my time in this course. With this in mind, we decided that I would add on to the required research project for the course by doing additional research and actually creating something based on my research. My research question was, “How does parent involvement effect student reading abilities and interests?” In addition to the research required for the course, I interviewed multiple other teachers, parents, and students to gather as much information I could about my question.
Afterwards, I concluded that parent involvement does have an effect on a students reading abilities. Most of the time, I found that student interest does not correlate with student involvement. Additionally, I found that socioeconomic status played a huge role in the amount of parent involvement in the classroom. I tried to interview parents, teachers, and students of various backgrounds in order to gather the mot inclusive results. Because of the research found, I decided to make a classroom newsletter that I sent home with all of the students in the fourth grade class that I was placed in for my partnership semester. The newsletter contained tips on how to be more involved with their child’s literacy development. Since I was placed in an area with a lower average socioeconomic status, I tried to include tips that were not time consuming for the parents. After I concluded my research and sent home the newsletter, I wrote a paper about what I learned from this experienced. I have attached both the newsletter and the paper below.
