Citation

Harper J, Schmidt F. Child. Youth Serv. Rev. 2016; 67: 238-246.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.06.009

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The consistently poor educational achievement of children in foster care has been associated with many negative outcomes including long term poor adult adjustment (e.g., higher rates of suicide, criminality, and substance abuse). The current study was undertaken to improve foster children's academic skills through academic remediation. Across this two year randomized study, 91 children in out of home foster or kinship care, between grades 1 and 8 inclusive, completed the study. One-half were randomly assigned to the 30-week direct-instruction small group tutoring condition, while the other half served as wait-list controls. A statistically significant increase in standard scores was found on reading decoding, spelling and mathematic skills for the children who received tutoring, but no differences were obtained on sentence comprehension. Significant effect sizes, in the small to moderate range, were also found in support of the tutoring condition across these three domains. The implications of these positive findings as they relate to improving educational achievement among children in foster care are discussed. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd

Language: en

Keywords

human; child; randomized controlled trial; clinical trial; major clinical study; comprehension; controlled study; controlled clinical trial; skill; foster care; effect size; spelling