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Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Family support for young learners — both during school and outside of school hours — can be crucial for developing key academic skills like reading. Gauging family support can be difficult, though, especially when multiple languages are involved, but a new paper explores the phenomenon of family support across both English and Spanish speaking families.

“Understanding Heterogeneous Patterns of Family Engagement With Educational Technology to Inform School-Family Communication in Linguistically Diverse Communities,” published in April via Sage Journals, used a free educational literacy app and text messaging program designed to help elementary school students develop specific literacy skills. Through the app and in-depth interviews with the families of more than 3,500 students, researchers identified several distinct profiles of educational engagement.

“We were really interested in understanding how families engage with technology to support their young children’s learning, particularly their reading development outside of school,” said Catherine Asher, an assistant research scientist at the Institute for Social Research’s Survey Research Center. “We wanted to see the timing and patterns of how they embrace or engage with technology, particularly when they’re provided with free resources.”

The app’s activities, which supported skill development in content area literacy, including background knowledge and vocabulary, and phonics, accompanied thematically related digital books.. All participants also received text messages which included support for using the app and advice and resources for engaging with literacy activities with their students over the summer months.

Researchers found that families tended to have specific usage patterns when they interacted with the app or responded to text messages, consistently timing their engagement to a particular part of the day. Additionally, researchers identified two broad groups within the technological interactions: families who were able to use the app and resources independently without any support, and other families who relied on text message communications to engage with the available resources. 

“It was surprising that the divisions were so clean, but families really did break into these distinct groups based on our observations,” said Asher. “But I think it lends itself to the idea that families need to be engaged in different ways. If you just send some kind of digital app home to the kids, you’re not going to engage all families because some other subset would prefer to engage differently. You will really miss a lot of families if you choose to communicate in just one medium.” 

Data collection took place during both 2019 and 2020, and researchers did notice some changes that appeared to be connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically that many more families leaned on the two-way texting assistance offered by researchers to support their children’s reading.

These findings, as well as other topics discussed in the paper, point to a strong need for more research into different ways to support families with technology.

“There are these big questions about providing technological resources and whether they have the ability to close equity gaps or whether they exacerbate those gaps,” said Asher. “Our findings suggest that things like two-way text messaging could be particularly helpful for a subset of families for whom technological access has historically been challenging.”

The full text of the paper is available via Sage Journals. This work is supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2017-000341).