Project EASE: a US success story
Catherine Snow and Gail Jordan
 

Project EASE is a parenting education programme developed in the USA. It is based on a longitudinal study that showed the long-term impact of rich early language experiences in the home on later literacy ability. Professor Catherine Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and associate professor Gail Jordan, Bethel College in St Paul, Michigan, report.

"As a parent, Project EASE offered me a chance to be an important part of my child's education ... I liked the way we both learned together and I liked seeing the expressions on my child's face as she learned that learning was of value for both of us."

These comments were made by a parent reflecting about the impact of her participation in a parent-child literacy project, which was offered during her daughter's kindergarten year. The programme, Project EASE (Early Access to Success in Education), aimed to develop a meaningful partnership between home and school. With increased pressure for accountability, schools now view literacy competence as a high priority. The demand for better literacy outcomes coincides, though, with limited school district (LEA) budgets. Solutions have to be sought outside the school walls. The challenges presented to the school district became a promising opportunity for schools to engage families in strategic ways.

Project EASE had four central goals: to give students the strongest possible start to their educational careers; to meet the individual needs of young learners; to engage parents in an integral way; and to build capacities that would underpin later school success. The school district looked to the research world to help develop the framework for the program. It drew from the rich set of data that was emerging from the Harvard Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development. The longitudinal study, led by Harvard researchers Catherine Snow, David Dickinson, and Patton Tabors, had spent ten years analysing the specific ways schools and homes contribute to children's emerging language and literacy abilities. Of particular interest to the researchers was the long-range impact of those contributions on later literacy competence. Their findings laid the groundwork for the design of Project EASE.

The research had revealed statistically and practically significant relationships between the types of language interactions children experienced at home and their literacy abilities at kindergarten and grade 1. (Subsequent follow-up confirmed that similar language-to-literacy relations hold through grades 4-6.) The researchers teased out which activities seemed to account for the largest part of literacy achievement. The areas of greatest impact were parent-child engagement in rich discussions during storybook reading, extended conversations during mealtime and playtime which included rare words and explanations, and opportunities to discuss things beyond the here and now. Child engagement in telling stories, at mealtimes, during toy play, and while book reading, was also important. In other words, it was rich language experiences that laid the foundation for later, more sophisticated literacy skills, which were the very skills Project EASE was designed to develop.

Guided by this pattern of research findings, Project EASE developed a yearlong parent education program that helped parents understand, develop, and implement the kinds of language interactions that research had identified as helpful. The programme included five distinct topics and language-rich sets of activities: vocabulary (Words, Words, Words), storybook reading (Once Upon a Time), narrative retellings (A Time to Remember), letter recognition and sound awareness (Cracking the Code), and non-fiction text (Talking About the World). Each unit began with a group session held in the school, that included a 30-minute parent lesson and a related hour-long parent-child activity session. Sessions were scheduled during both the school day and the evening, to accommodate varying family schedules. Kindergarten teachers then assigned as homework follow-up activities that required 30 minutes a week for three weeks, within each unit. All activities and materials were strategically chosen to illustrate specific language activities and were carefully organized for parent involvement.

The results of the programme were impressive. Parent enthusiasm and involvement far exceeded expectations. Typically, 85% of the parents participated. Student outcomes for children whose families participated in Project EASE were assessed using pre- and post-tests in a variety of language and literacy tasks. When participants' outcomes were measured against those of the control group, children in project EASE grew significantly faster in vocabulary, story understanding, and story production -- the very areas Project EASE was designed to impact. Since the initial implementation, Project EASE has been extended to other districts with a similar pattern of results. Parents love it and children develop stronger literacy skills. Project EASE demonstrates the value for schools of using research findings to solve practical but challenging problems. It builds on the findings that an early childhood focus on language rather than unitary reading skills can be of long-term value. As another parent concluded, "I felt like I was a part of and involved in my child's education. He means the most to us. We wanted to be there for him." Partnerships created in that spirit will be enduring.

References
Dickinson, D.K. & Tabors, P.O.  (Eds.) (2001) Beginning literacy with language: young children learning at home and school. Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.

Jordan, C., Snow, C. E. & Porche, M. V. (2000) Project EASE: the effect of a family literacy project on kindergarten students' early literacy skills. Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 35, no.4, pp.524-546.
 
 

For more information about the research findings in the Home-School Study and to access materials used in Project EASE visit http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~pild/homeschoolstudy.htm or http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~pild/projectease.htm.

 
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