Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: May 20, 2024
Date Accepted: Jan 16, 2025
A Pilot Randomized Wait-list Controlled Trial of an Online Family Literacy and Wellness Program for Latino Dual Language Learners
ABSTRACT
Background:
Early childhood interventions can simultaneously promote positive health and early language experiences, but often implementation and health equity receive insufficient attention in the development process.
Objective:
We applied a health equity lens to refine and pilot test a family literacy and wellness program designed for Latino dual language learners (DLL) entering Kindergarten and their caregivers.
Methods:
In collaboration with a parent and community advisory board, we refined an 8-week family literacy and wellness program and conducted a pilot randomized controlled trial with wait list control. The program was specifically designed by our interprofessional team for Latino DLLs and uses health topics (i.e., nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and social-emotional development) to (1) introduce foundational language and literacy skills to children, (2) empower families to engage in health and home literacy activities using a strengths-based approach, and (3) encourage maintenance of families’ home language. We assessed reach collecting socio-demographic information, attendance, acceptability using a parent survey, and preliminary effects on home literacy activities assessed with a validated parent-report instrument (StimQ2 quantity, quality, content, and concepts subdomains) and child literacy skills using investigator-developed assessments. We analyzed quantitative data using descriptive statistics and regression analyses.
Results:
Parents and community advisors informed program content. Thirty-two parent-child dyads enrolled in the pilot RCT. All parents identified as Latino and half had not completed high school, indicating that we reached the intended audience. Parents rated the program as highly acceptable, and 72% of participants attended ≥ half of the sessions. After participation, group 1 had higher scores on StimQ2 quality scores (Effect size (ES) 0.99; p=0.02) and higher quantity scores (ES=1.01; p=0.04) compared to group 2.
Conclusions:
Similar interprofessional collaborations could be a promising strategy to promote equity in early language experiences for Latino dual language learners and their families. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05339464
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.