New Study: Parents Learn How to Help Children Succeed in School Using MegaSkills

WASHINGTON - Parent involvement in children’s schooling can be a problem or a panacea. Anxiety about the educational system and parental mistrust of educators are filling the headlines. What can be done? Can a short term program for parents make a long term difference?

The answer from a just released 10 year Title I study in Warwick, RI is yes. (For study summary, contact:edstaff@megaskillshsi.org.)

Over the years, the Home and School Institute has been told that the MegaSkills Parent Workshops have made a big difference for families and schools: The goal of the workshops is to build student and parent capacities for learning for school and life. A question we have asked ourselves: how much of a difference, over time, does this program make.

We now have a summary of the just completed study of the 10 year experience of the Warwick, RI, Public Schools Title I Program using the MegaSkills Parent Workshops with parents of children in the Regular K-12 Title I Program and parents of four-year olds in the Title I Pre-K Program.

This study is significant, especially now, because educators and families are bombarded with short term test score results when what we really have to care about in education are long term results.

Preparing children to learn effectively and with continuing motivation are not “soft” skills, as sometimes described. They are the “hardest” they are the bedrock, the foundation for education all through school and life. This is not sufficiently understood.

Two breakthrough announcements (Summer 2009) provide strong support that these truths are at last being recognized.

1) Singapore, with the highest academic scores in the world, has identified life skills and values at the top of its education goals.

2) The Education Testing Service has just developed a new Personality Index, identifying perseverance and related traits, for evaluating graduate school applications. These so-called “soft” skills are indeed not “soft” after all.

In interviews conducted by Warwick Title I staff, 100% of a sample of parents from both these groups reported continuing satisfaction with their children’s school performance, both academically and behaviorally, years after their participation in the one-semester (approximately 10 hour)workshop program.

A body of research has reported long term positive outcomes of school programs, which include a strong parental involvement component. However, there had been some skepticism that a relatively short and early intervention could have long range effects.

The Warwick finding is consistent with a growing body of educational research which indicates that involvement of parents in their children’s education can have longer term effects beyond the actual period of school sponsored involvement.

The MegaSkills Parent Workshops consist of a series of interactive seminars which provide instruction to parents on the importance of the MegaSkills to the learning process and in how to use the MegaSkills Home Learning System to provide the structure for continuing involvement in their child’s education. The MegaSkills include: Confidence, Motivation, Effort, Responsibility, Initiative, Perseverance, Caring, Teamwork, Common Sense, and Problem Solving.

We do not claim that every person who participates in the program will undergo a transformational experience. Yet, the findings from the Warwick study indicate that parents do learn new patterns of relating to and working with their children so that they continue to support their children’s education at home long after they participate in the workshops. Plus, parents become stronger supporters of the schools.

This new study is a key finding, important not only for MegaSkills, but for all education programs that seek to achieve sustained and long lasting change. This is the direction we have to take so that truly no child, no family, no school is left behind.

I look forward to hearing from you, responding to your questions, and to sending you the summary.

Dorothy Rich, Ed.D. is founder/president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute and creator of MegaSkills for Dorothy Rich Associates, Washington DC.

For more information: http://www.megaskills.org/ edstaff@megaskillshsi.org, vandijim@aol.com