The United States is a vehicle-dependent society and allows teens to obtain drivers licenses at age 16 or younger. Many factors have been linked to teen risky driving behaviors that resulted in teens receiving their first citations. This was the first study to investigate parental management of teens after they received their first citations…

The purpose of this study is to investigate why girls in an urban high school setting engage in physical fights in order to better understand the female student's mindset about fighting. A search of ERIC, Sociological Abstracts, Psychological Abstracts, Dissertation Abstracts and dissertations was conducted to review research in the following…

This dissertation was written collaboratively by Cynthia Warren, Linetta Carter, and George Edwards with the exception of chapter 4 which is the individual effort of the aforementioned researchers. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of at-home reading activities and parental involvement on classroom communication arts assessments…

The purpose of this applied dissertation study was to determine the relative impact of parental involvement, parental school perception, student generation status, and Caribbean adolescents' own attitudes and behavior towards academic achievement and reading comprehension skills. For this study, 45 Caribbean parents from Grenadian, Guyanese,…

This dissertation examines the parental involvement policies and programs of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), the country's fourth largest school district. Through a holistic case research methodology, it explores the multiple perspectives and practices of district- and school-level employees who are charged with involving families…

This research was designed as a qualitative study as it sought to address Puerto Rican bilingual professional parents' perceptions of their children's school experiences based in North Carolina. In this study, 6 Puerto Rican bilingual professional parents who live in the North Carolina Research Triangle Park (RTP) area were interviewed about their…

The authors used data from the National Household Education Surveys (NHES) Program 2007 Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007) (N=10,681) to examine household income, gender, and race of parents, and their importance in shaping parental involvement in children's education. The study finds…

This report updates two previous reports: "Trends in the Use of School Choice: 1993 to 1999" (Bielick and Chapman 2003) and "Trends in the Use of School Choice: 1993 to 2003" (Tice et al. 2006). Using data from the National Household Education Survey (NHES) of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education…

This paper presents an overview of the Head Start program. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), $1 billion will be provided to the Office of Head Start to promote the school readiness of low-income children, including children on federally-recognized reservations and children of migratory farm workers, by enhancing…

Background/Context: This article explores the experiences of one Mexican American family as they make a key curriculum choice for their 9-year-old son. Relatively little attention has been paid to parents' beliefs, attitudes, and, in particular, experiences as they actively engage in--and sometimes affect--their children's schooling. Parents'…

The purpose of the study was to examine early childhood education pre-service teachers' perceptions of the increasing role of new technologies in classroom environments. Given the growth in interest in a teacher's technological literacy, the research focused on similarities in and differences between pre-service teachers' concepts of technology…

This article describes a program for supporting parents and caregivers of K-4 students at an urban university's charter school. To create this program, university faculty and school administrators developed a series of workshops to foster school-home literacy connections. Information about surveys, meetings and program implementation are provided…

In this article, we draw on critical philosophies and theories related to diversity, leadership, and learning to suggest that successful school-family partnerships not only encompass collaborative structures but involve educators who reject deficit-based views of diverse families. We marshal data from our studies of school-family relations in two…

If students are to become proficient at using social skills, parents must be involved in teaching and reinforcing these skills at home. Parent involvement is associated with increased student success, especially when it includes a two-way exchange of information between home and school. As the traditional family has changed, new methods of…

Using data from the National Early Head Start (EHS) Research and Evaluation Project (N = 1851), the current study examined relations among cumulative family and social risk, assessed during infancy and the preschool years, and children's prekindergarten achievement, self-regulatory skills, and problematic social behavior, testing if these…