NCCRESt

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Family Involvement

• Community Update, 2000.
  This document consists of ten issues (covering January through December 2000) of the Newsletter, "Community Update," containing articles on community and family involvement in education.
• Crossing Boundaries: Multi-National Action Research on Family-School Collaboration. Report No. 33
  This report details studies by eight researchers from five countries--Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and Spain--that examine boundary-crossing issues between teachers and parents, between policies and school reality, between cultures, and between research and practice.
• Curricular Modifications, Family Outreach, and a Mentoring Program: Impacts on Achievement and Gifted Identification in High-Risk Primary Students
  A study investigated the efficacy of specific interventions (mentoring, parental involvement, and multicultural curricula) on academic achievement of 273 elementary students from low-socioeconomic environments. The interventions had no statistically significant effect on student achievement in any grade.
• Moving Teacher Education in/to the Community
  Describes a set of structured experiences within a preservice teacher education program that helped construct, with the students, a critical perspective toward better understanding pupils' home, community, and school lives. The structured experiences occurred within a New Mexico school community research project combined with a course on families, schools, and communities.
• Reaching All Families: Creating Family-Friendly Schools
  Recognizing the critical role parents have in developing their children's learning habits, this booklet offers strategies that focus on ways principals and teachers can communicate with diverse families about: (1) school goals, programs, activities, and procedures; (2) the progress of individual students; and (3) home activities which can improve children's school learning.
• Whose Community Schools? New Discourses, Old Patterns
  Describes the history of community schools, which link schools, families, and communities via family-support initiatives and school-linked services. Discusses family involvement in schools; partnerships for improvement that emphasize families without creating dependency; and new citizenship (building communities and promoting competence), which provides a stronger conceptual basis for community schools than did partners for improvement discourse.