Seven years after their parents attended coaching sessions in preschool, children showed measurable improvements in how they behaved in class and how well they could hold information in their minds—a striking reminder that what happens at home reverberates through middle school and beyond.
Penn State researchers studying Head Start students found that when parents received coaching and play-based instructional materials while their children were in preschool, those children later displayed fewer conduct problems in seventh grade and significantly higher working memory skills. The discovery emerged from the Research Based, Developmentally Informed (REDI) program, a supplemental educational initiative designed to bridge the achievement gap between children from low-income and higher-income households.
The research team, led by Karen Bierman, Evan Pugh University Professor of Psychology, examined data from 105 Head Start participants who received school-based REDI compared with 95 children who received REDI at school and whose parents also participated in the home coaching component. The difference was meaningful. When a research assistant from Penn State visited students' homes in seventh grade to assess their reading achievement and memory skills, students whose parents had been coached scored notably higher on working memory tasks—the ability to hold and manipulate information in the brain. Teachers reported that these same students displayed lower levels of conduct problems, and the students themselves reported feeling more socially confident and fewer associations with peers who misbehaved.
"This study shows how important it is to involve parents in the development of key educational skills," Bierman said. The coaching itself was concrete and practical. Parents received grocery store props for pretend play, along with guidance on how to use them to support their child's language and emerging literacy skills. These seemingly simple tools created a bridge between what children learned in preschool classrooms and their daily home environment.
The journey to this discovery spanned nearly two decades. Bierman and her collaborators originally created REDI around 20 years ago to target social-emotional learning and literacy development. While the program successfully improved student performance, many benefits faded by the end of first grade, and REDI students began performing academically like their non-participating peers by elementary school. Recognizing that the window of impact had narrowed, the researchers designed a parent engagement component to extend those gains.
The researchers also identified how the program worked. Immediately after the parent coaching, students displayed improvements in learning behaviors and social competence. Over time, these improvements indirectly led to the long-term outcomes visible in seventh grade—a reminder that educational interventions rarely produce immediate, dramatic shifts, but rather set in motion a slow accumulation of better habits and skills.
What makes this finding particularly significant is what it was not: a comparison between children who received REDI and those who didn't. Instead, it was a comparison between two groups of Head Start students who all received school-based REDI, differing only in whether their parents participated in coaching at home. That distinction matters because it isolates the specific value of parental involvement, showing that families with fewer resources can powerfully shape their children's long-term outcomes when given the right tools and support.