Can a Scalable Parenting Program Improve Children's Readiness for School? An Evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) Start Program

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

Early language environment influences early language development. The relation between family Socioeconomic status and the child's early language skills is partly due to the quantity and quality of parent speech directed towards the child during day-to-day interactions. Parental beliefs and knowledg...

Early language environment influences early language development. The relation between family Socioeconomic status and the child's early language skills is partly due to the quantity and quality of parent speech directed towards the child during day-to-day interactions. Parental beliefs and knowledge influence the early language environment to which children are exposed. Differences in parental knowledge play an important role in determining how parents communicate with their children. A particularly relevant dimension of beliefs that affect the language interactions between parents and children relate to whether parents believe that children's skills are fixed or are malleable by the environment. The Socioeconomic status gaps in the child-directed speech were mediated by parental knowledge about the importance of the language environment for the promotion of the child's language development. The study will evaluate the implementation of LENA Start program, which is a scalable and low-cost intervention to improve the child's language environment. The intervention provides parents with information about the importance of a child's early language environment for the child's language development. It transfers practical knowledge about how to improve the language environment without requiring major changes in parents' or children's routines. Finally, it presents objective feedback about the quality of the language environment by using the LENA system. Participants who enroll in this study will meet with the research team up to twelve times, either in person or virtually. There will be two visits as part of the LENA Start evaluation study during which the Rice study team will collect data through parent survey, Cognitive Home Environment (StimQ) instrument, and Language Development Snapshot. The other ten meetings will be weekly meetings in which the parents will complete the LENA Start program. Only the parents who are selected by the random lottery will participate in the ten weekly LENA start program meetings. At each of the 10 LENA program sessions, a member of the Rice research team will attend (either virtually or in person) and collect data about Fidelity of Implementation of the LENA program, including liaison adherence to the material in the session, parental behavior at the session, liaison workload and preparation, as well as other measures of fidelity. This data will be collected in both the in-person implementation plan or the virtual implementation plan. If sessions are conducted virtually, a member of the Rice research team will join the weekly Zoom meeting. If sessions are conducted in person, the research team member will attend the weekly meetings in Alief schools.

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