“Read with me”: How teachers in Aarhus support parents to improve their children's reading skills

Performance indicators

The evaluation of the READ co-production project is still being undertaken by researchers from the University of Aarhus. A crucial element of the projects is the 2X2 design, in which 4 different groups have varying degrees of support: 1) Children who benefitted from the early Child Programme; 2) children who benefitted from READ in schools; 3) children who benefitted from both co-production projects; 4) children who did not benefit from either co-production project.

However, the Early Child Programme has already been evaluated. The results show increased language comprehension among children with low-SES parents, as measured in a municipal language comprehension test. In particular, the reading ability of low-SES children participating in the Early Child Programme increased significantly – the effect corresponds to the difference between having a mother with a higher education and a mother with a lower education. Furthermore, the Early Child Programme substantially lowered the share of children attending reception classes when they started in school, down from 6.7 % in the control group to just 0.7% in the Early Child Programme group – a reduction of 89 %. The co-production approach was clearly effective in improving education outcomes for disadvantaged children.

There was also an increased volume of reading with their children on the part of parents who state they have low Danish proficiency but who do have the time to help their child with reading. These families read aloud 3.84 times per week on average, whereas the control group families read aloud 3.0 times per week on average.

Finally, on average there was an 8.8 % increase in the knowledge of parents about what they can do to help children read. However, amongst disadvantaged children this increase was as high as 16.5 %. The remarkable thing about this co-production approach is that these results were achieved with fairly small resources, both on the part of professionals and of parents.

The Danish National Tests will be used to assess the effects of READ. These tests assess the language, text comprehension and text decoding skills of children. Tests about number and algebra, geometry and applied mathematics will be used for evaluating the maths part of the co-production project. Moreover, a special writing assignment has been developed for the evaluation of READ. This was administered both before and after the READ Programme. Results from these assignments will also contribute to the final evaluation of READ.