Children and families receive maximum benefits from early childhood programs when families are actively engaged. "Parental involvement" is an established feature of Aboriginal Head Start in Urban and Northern Communities (AHSUNC) in Canada, and there is interest in increasing the knowledge on how AHSUNC sites engage with parents and…

Migration flows are profoundly changing the composition of classrooms. Results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that in 2015, almost one in four 15-year-old students in OECD countries reported that they were either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent. Between 2003 and 2015, the share of…

This 30-year longitudinal study examined pathways from problematic childhood behavior patterns to future disadvantaged conditions for family environment and child rearing in adulthood. Participants were mothers (n = 328) and fathers (n = 222) with lower income backgrounds participating in the ongoing Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project. Structural…

Since 1999, the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) has provided funding to provincial school authorities for projects designed to improve student learning and performance. Conducted in three-year cycles, this unique approach has successfully helped to initiate approximately 1,600 grassroots projects led by school districts, teachers,…

Studies show a positive correlation between parental involvement and academic achievement, but the involvement of immigrant or poor parents is lower than that of native-born, middle-class parents. Reasons may include socioeconomic status, level of instruction, language fluency, status of immigrant community, years of residency, relations between…

A practicum strategy was designed and implemented that focused on reducing the negative impact of adverse environmental conditions in one particular neighborhood in a town in Alberta (Canada) with a population of 8,500. Children in this neighborhood were served by one elementary school (enrollment 383), from which the strategy was implemented. The…

The report in this issue of Curriculum Bulletin documents extra-curricular and after school activities adopted by Canadian urban communities in Ontario to combat cultural disadvantagement and reading deficiencies among inner-city children, pre-school through junior high school ages. The projects described in the metropolitan areas of Hamilton,…

The School Improvement Grants Program is a British Columbia-based action research project to support efforts to raise literacy and math skills in public schools serving low-socioeconomic status neighborhoods. The program--which provides $25,000 in planning and implementation grants for each participating school over 2.5 years--began in 2001 and…

As part of a larger study of school system communication with second language parents in three Alberta (Canada) urban senior high schools, this study focused on analysis of interview data from teachers responding to questions on intercultural communication barriers and bridges with students and immigrant parents. Data were collected through 30…