The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
The Transition to Afterschool: One City’s Approach to Connecting Young Children and Their Families to Learning and Enrichment Opportunities
What steps can programs take to help families successfully transition to school and afterschool? How can families make informed choices about afterschool opportunities? What information do families need in this process? This video demonstrates how Cambridge, Massachusetts, is addressing these and related questions to help connect families to afterschool learning and enrichment opportunities prior to school entry.
The Transition to Afterschool: One City’s Approach to Connecting Young Children and Their Families to Learning and Enrichment Opportunities—Part Two
How can you create a resource to help families of young children successfully transition to afterschool? What questions should be addressed? This video looks at one city’s approach to helping connect families and their young children to afterschool enrichment opportunities.
The Transition to Kindergarten: A Review of Current Research and Promising Practices to Involve Families
This brief offers a synthesis of findings based on a review of current research on the transition to kindergarten, especially the important role that families play in the transition. It focuses on promising transition practices and how schools can get involved in their implementation.
Free. Available online only.
The Trenton Central High School Obesity Prevention Project: Encouraging Democracy Through Inclusion
Katrina Bledsoe of the College of New Jersey writes about the inclusion of student voices in the evaluation of an obesity prevention program
The Washington Heights Community Schools Project
The Washington Heights Community Schools Project conducts an evaluation to support educational and health outcomes.
The Welfare-to-Work Transition and Parent Involvement in Education: A Southern Case Study
This exploratory case study examines whether the transition from welfare to work influences parental involvement in elementary school education.
Free. Available online only.
Theory of Action in Practice
Claudia Weisburd and Tamara Sniad from Foundations, Inc. describe the use of a theory of change and a theory of action to help address questions about how to develop and evaluate professional development for after school staff.
Thinking Big: A New Framework for Family Involvement Policy, Practice, and Research
Suzanne Bouffard and Heather Weiss reframe family involvement as part of a broader complementary learning approach to promoting children’s success in education and in life.
Thinking Like an Educator: An Integrative Approach to Preparing Educators
Veronica Boix Mansilla and Robert Kegan from the Harvard Graduate School of Education describe a new course that uses an integrative approach to help education students learn to “think like an educator.”
Thoughts on Early Childhood Research: Improving Connections
Marilou Hyson and Heather Biggar, from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, offer ideas for how stakeholders in early childhood can share research results.
Three Lessons in Developing a Systemic Approach to Family Engagement
Learn how the second-largest school district in California worked collaboratively to develop a systemic family engagement framework while putting family voice front and center.
Tim Kelly: A School Responds to a Family in Need
Tim Kelly, a first grade student, comes to school hungry, dirty, emotionally needy, and academically unprepared. His teacher believes his lack of care at home is contributing to his poor school performance. How can a teacher individualize parent involvement?
Free. Available online only.
Tips for Administrators, Teachers, and Families: How to Share Data Effectively
This new set of tip sheets helps administrators, teachers, and families identify the best ways to share student data in meaningful ways, on a regular basis, to strengthen family–school partnerships and promote student learning. The tips can be used to guide the formal conversations that take place during parent–teacher conferences, but they are especially designed to help promote less formal, ongoing conversations about student progress among teachers, families, and students throughout the year.
Tomasito's Mother Comes to School/La mamá de Tomasito visita la escuela
Spanish Translation Available in Storybook Corner. This online bilingual storybook about family involvement at school is designed to engage children and their families. For educators, the printable online storybook is an easy-to-use family involvement tool that supports literacy. The story was developed from research and is based on the real experiences of one Latino boy and his family who are acculturating to the U.S.
Free. Available online only.
Transforming Family Engagement
In this Commentary, Harvard Family Research Project’s Evelyn Brosi Semenza and Heidi Rosenberg examine how innovative approaches and tools—including digital media—are helping to transform family engagement. Approaches include community–school partnerships that help promote school readiness; the integration of digital media in educators’ family engagement strategies; and the use of online tools to gather information about parents’ perspectives.
Transforming Pittsburgh Into Kidsburgh!
Dynamic Pittsburgh! Hundreds of the city’s PreK–12 educators, artists, technologists, and families are working together to remake learning.
Transforming School Culture Through the Arts
J. Curtis Jones from the Partnership for Whole School Change in Boston describes a performing arts intervention that integrates program concepts into its evaluation.
Transforming Schools Through Community Organizing: A Research Review
This paper reviews the literature on community organizing. It examines how community organizing differs from traditional parent involvement activities, outlines the characteristic strategies used to engage parents in organizing efforts, and describes the outcomes of these efforts.
Free. Available online only.
Transforming Training
This paper defines the characteristics of family support in the child care context, highlights research showing the need for provider training to raise program quality, and discusses five vital topics for training child care providers in family support. The author argues for the need to develop one cohesive training system for providers.
$7.00 . 33 Pages.
Transition as a Shared Responsibility: The Bridging Worlds Reader’s Theater
By coupling the Bridging Worlds case with a Reader’s Theater, we helped students examine the complexities involved in sharing responsibility for student learning during the transition to school.
Transitioning to School: Policy, Practice, and Reality
Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia's the Curry School of Education discusses helping young children to better transition from preschool to kindergarten and into the early years of grade school.
Transmedia Activities: Engaging Families to Improve Children's Early Mathematics Achievement
Make way for mathematics digital media! New research reveals that regular use of digital games and hands-on mathematics activities at home, along with parent training around digital media for learning, can improve mathematics outcomes for young children.
Twists and Turns in the Journey: Youth Activists' Use of Research in Their Campaigns for Small Schools
Kristine Lewis shares Research for Action's experience with training youth to use social science research methods in their campaigns to im-prove their local high schools.
Understanding and Evaluating Family Engagement in Out-of-School Time (Workshop)
Engaging with families is one of the many strategies that out-of-school time (OST) programs use to create quality, adult-supervised experiences for youth during nonschool hours. This workshop introduced participants to the latest research and evaluation findings on family involvement in OST programs, and shared strategies for engaging with families, using two case studies to illustrate these practices in context.
Free. Available online only.
Understanding and Measuring Attendance in Out-of-School Time Programs
This brief reviews developmental research and out-of-school time program evaluations to examine three research-based indicators of attendance—intensity, duration, and breadth—offering different models for how attendance in out-of-school time programs can influence youth outcomes.
Free. Available online only.