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The National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools creates bridges between
research and practice, linking people with research-based information and resources that they
can use to effectively connect schools, families and communities. As part of the Center's
work of gathering and sharing information about the latest research and the most innovative
thinking in family and community connections with schools, we have created this annotated
bibliography of the literature.
For this database, the staff examined a broad body of literature related to school-family-community
connections, including journal articles, books, reports, conference papers and proceedings,
and literature reviews. The database currently includes 395 entries. The process for
locating relevant items consisted of searching and contacting different types of sources and
repositories, such as the major education information databases like ERIC (Educational
Resources Information Center) and Education Abstracts, scanning web sites of organizations
and agencies involved in school-family-community partnership work for reports and articles
available online, and contacting authors in the field for recent publications. Items from
the last six years were selected with an emphasis on recent works, along with a few
background pieces previous to 1995. Both empirical and non-empirical types of literature
are included. Empirical literature includes research and evaluation studies. Non-empirical
literature includes conceptual and theoretical pieces, practice-based works, policy-oriented
items, and literature reviews. The criteria for including items in this collection were
the relevance of the study to family and community connections with schools, the soundness
of methodology, and the implications of the study for the field. See
Tips for Reading and
Interpreting the Annotations
for brief descriptions of each type of literature.
This database is not a comprehensive collection of all relevant literature in certain
specific areas, such as special education, nor does it include all seminal works in this
field. It does not include practitioner resources or "how to" documents either, since
the intent was to address research and theoretical literature. As the Center continues
its work, this collection will be updated by adding new works, and literature that
relates to specific topics, such as special needs populations, early childhood, and
community organizations. We hope practitioners, researchers and people interested in
this field will find this database a useful tool for accessing current research-based
information about these connections and how to make them work to support student outcomes.
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