An Investigation of Parent Tutorial Intervention as a Means of Improving Reading Skills in the Primary Age Child.

This study compared the performance of three groups of reading disabled students: those who were tutored by supervised parents, those who were tutored by unsupervised parents, and those who were not tutored. The subjects were 159 first-, second-, and third-grade children who read at least one year below grade level. The parents who tutored their children used an instructional guide for a ten-week period during the summer months. In addition, the supervised parents were required to attend weekly instructional workshop meetings in order to hear formal presentations regarding the program and were supervised individually each week by the author. At the end of the ten-week period, the results suggested that parental tutoring efforts were not significantly different for the children of either the supervised tutors or the unsupervised tutors. However, parental tutoring was effective in increasing children's scores in some reading subskills on the posttests. (Author/MKM)