Ready to Read: Cradling Literacy

Ready to Read is an innovative program designed to increase early literacy skills among low-income children from birth to 3 years old in Denver. The Ready to Read study was selected by Mile High United Way to build the evidence base of a promising literacy program, Cradling Literacy (CL). CL is a training curriculum designed to increase teachers’ knowledge and skills related to early childhood development, literacy and learning, and family engagement.

Study Goals:

The evaluation assessed whether teachers that implemented CL in addition to Dialogic Reading (DR) provided greater support for literacy activities or resulted in families achieving greater gains in children’s oral and communication skills (relative to those at centers that did not use CL). The evaluation also explored the impact of CL using a quasi-experimental design.

Research Questions:

The research questions were:

• Implementation Questions:
  • How many individuals were trained on DR?
  • How many modules of CL training did center-based staff receive?
  • Did center-based teachers demonstrate increased knowledge after attending the CL training sessions? To what extent did teachers in the DR-only group demonstrate knowledge of the concepts covered in the CL curriculum?
  • Did center-based teachers find the CL training to be useful?
  • What are the characteristics of the CL intervention as it is being implemented? What is the consistency of CL program delivery? What is the quality of CL program delivery?
  • What are teachers’ and coaches’ perceptions of the impacts of CL training and coaching?
  • What are teachers’ and coaches’ views of the content and delivery of CL? What aspects were most/least successful and helpful to them?
• Impact Questions:
  • Do teachers in the CL group demonstrate greater short-term improvements in their support of children’s language and literacy development than teachers in the DR-only group? Long-term?
  • Do children in the CL group demonstrate greater increases in their oral language and communication skills than children in the DR-only group?
  • Do parents/caregivers whose children attend a center more frequently show greater gains in their support of their child’s language and literacy development than those with a lower level of attendance?
  • Do children with higher levels of attendance in a center demonstrate greater gains in their oral language and communication skills than those with lower levels of attendance?

Findings:

The evaluation found the following:

• Teachers showed short-term gains related to their classroom-level support for learning and their knowledge of practices to support early literacy.
• Parents/caregivers in the intervention group made significant gains over time in the frequency of parent-child storytelling and in children’s verbal and nonverbal communication, while comparison parents/caregivers remained stable or showed more modest gains.
• Attendance was important, with children who attended their intervention center more frequently making greater gains in language skills and words produced than did intervention-group children who attended less frequently.

For more information, download the full report and report brief.