Custom made

The aim of this project is to explore how programmes encouraging low-educated parents to stimulate the early linguistic and literacy development of children can be better tailored to the needs of participating families. A consortium of researchers and practice partners has identified key challenges in the implementation of such programmes and has identified a number of promising opportunities. In the project we want to further develop and evaluate these promising opportunities.

The main purpose of the tools during the first sub-project is to help pedagogical staff/family coaches identify existing routines and resources in the home environment and use them to tailor coaching and the choice of parent-child activities to the situation of the individual family.

The research consists of two sub-projects. The first focuses on language activities at home. The second focuses on the development of digital tools in the implementation of parent-child activities. 

1. In the first sub-project, we build on an existing approach, in which pedagogical staff and family coaches are helped to involve low-educated parents in their child's oral language development in the context of pre-school (At home in Language).
2. In the second sub-project, we investigate the effects of three types of activities developed to address problems that parents may encounter when implementing parent-child programmes:

• We are testing the effectiveness of using digital, animated picture books as a means for parents to engage in joint activities with their child,
• We test the effectiveness of a storytelling app that can promote cognitively stimulating parent-child interactions, and
• We test the effectiveness of using activities in the home language for bilingual parents.

The programmes Social Work, Pedagogical Educational Assistant and PABO (primary education teacher training college) are involved in this research. Insights from the research and the intended tools (connecting to the world of target group families, communicating with this target group and designing appropriate language activities) that follow from this research request will be incorporated in these modules, internships, minors and final projects of the Social Work, Pedagogical Educational Assistant and PABO (primary education teacher training college) programmes. In addition, internships and final projects on the theme of collaboration with parents are supervised in all three study programmes.