Examining the Effects of Family-Implemented Literacy Interventions for School-Aged Children: A Meta-Analysis

25 interventions across 22 studies — 12 group designs and 10 single-case experimental designs

School-aged children (not preschoolers) whose family members delivered literacy instruction at home, both code-focused and meaning-focused

The most directly on-point meta-analysis for parent-delivered instruction at school age, and the first to separate group designs from single-case designs rather than pooling them. That separation is the study's most useful contribution: the two design families give answers four times apart. Heterogeneity is substantial in both (I-squared 36-39%, Q highly significant).

Group-design studies give g=0.36 (p<.01); single-case experimental designs give g=1.50 (p<.01) on the same intervention class. Within group designs the effect splits by outcome type: code-focused skills (phonological awareness, decoding/word reading, spelling, text reading) g=0.28, meaning-focused skills (vocabulary, listening comprehension, reading comprehension) g=0.41. The authors also document how thin the literature is, especially for older children. Read alongside Sénéchal & Young 2008's d=1.15 for parent tutoring, this is the deflation the archive's effect-size rules predict: the modern, design-separated estimate for a family member teaching a school-aged child to read is roughly a third of a standard deviation.

Low — these are controlled intervention comparisons in which families are equally selected and the treatment is what varies.

Covers an overlapping but later and school-aged literature than Sénéchal & Young 2008 and reaches a much smaller number for the same activity; the direction replicates, the magnitude does not. The group-versus-single-case gap is the mechanism by which the older, larger estimates were produced.