Martine van der Pluijm

137 How to support lower-educated parents? RESULTS OF STUDY 1 Parent participation was higher at posttest ( M = 1.75, SD = .47), than at pretest ( M = 1.17, SD =.58). At posttest, 98.6% of the parents indicated they were involved in parent-child activities, compared to 88.6% at pretest. Table 5.2 shows the descriptive and test results for pre- and posttest scores for parents’ perceptions of SFPs in general and of SFPs to support oral language development, their feelings of self-efficacy, and the HLE. The mean scores for the SFP in general ( M = 5.11) and self-efficacy ( M = 5.37) were remarkably high at pretest. Although the means of SFPs at the posttest were slightly higher than at the pretest, there is no significant difference in parents’ perceptions in all four constructs. We found no effects for quality of delivery by teachers (i.e., comparison of three teachers with a low-quality delivery with the 11 others with a satisfactory quality of delivery). TABLE 5.2: Descriptives and effects repeated measures parent perceptions ( n =71) Pretest Posttest F(df) p Mean SD Mean SD SFPs 5.11 .46 5.20 .51 2.17(70) .15 Goal-directed SFPs 4.57 .83 4.73 .97 1.72(70) .19 Self-efficacy 5.37 .52 5.42 .61 .28(70) .60 HLE 4.16 .48 4.16 .56 .00(70) .95 Measured on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (disagree strongly) to 6 (agree strongly) and for the HLE ranging from 1 (never) to 6 (every day). Table 5.3 shows the effects of education level as a factor of the previous analyses of parent perceptions. We distinguished four education levels: very low (primary education and lower), low (secondary education; aged 12 to 15), middle (secondary education: aged 16 to 18), and high (senior secondary vocational education and university). We found a significant effect of educational level on change of the HLE ( F 1, 66) =3.110, p = .03). The partial eta squared is 0.12, which is defined as a medium effect size (Cohen, 1988). Post hoc analyses show that there is a significant difference between the very low-educated group ( M = 4.59 at pretest; M = 4.97 at posttest) and the other groups in terms of HLE change: low-educated group ( M = 4.80 at pretest; M = 4.67 at posttest), middle-educated group ( M = 5.02 at pretest; M = 4.92 at posttest ), and high-educated group ( M = 5.18 at pretest; M = 5.03 at posttest ). Figure 5.4 presents the results. Home language activities in the lowest educated group increased but decreased slightly in the other groups.