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Citation:

Pianta, R. C., Kraft-Sayre, M., Rimm-Kaufman, S., Gercke, N., & Higgins, T. (2001). Collaboration in building partnerships between families and schools: The National Center for Early Development and LearningÕs Kindergarten Transition Intervention. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 16, 117-132.

Annotation:
This paper describes and examines a collaborative intervention to improve kindergarten transitions. Goals are to describe the process, the transition activities used, and participantsÕ roles and relationships. A design team including university researchers, preschool teachers and staff, elementary school staff, and parents discussed transition needs, data collection, and the intervention design and implementation. Using a menu-based approach to transition enabled it to be implemented in various school settings. The most common practices involved visiting kindergarten classrooms with preschoolers, orientation meetings in the spring of the preschool year, and activities in the elementary school designed to familiarize children and parents. Although they shared mutually positive views of one another regarding activities and roles, preschool staff perceived mothers less positively than mothers rated staff. Mothers also rated preschool staff as more helpful than other sources of social support and as an increasingly important source of support. The collaborative research process was viewed as having important benefits and manageable costs. Loss of control over measurement and implementation was balanced by ecological validity, meaningfulness of the process to all participants, and professional development of all participants. While they noted a degree of success in familiarizing families with elementary schools, they also noted a rift between preschool and kindergarten. Data were collected from 110 African American and Caucasian families and include family interviews and participantsÕ perceptions of one anotherÕs roles and activities in the transition process. Preschool teachers, family workers and mothers were asked to rate the home-school relationship. The study may be used when considering possible transition programs. One limitation of the study is that there is no control group, making it more difficult to generalize these findings to other settings.