Date Approved

6-28-2000

Embargo Period

6-23-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S. in Teaching

Department

Interdisciplinary and Inclusive Education

College

College of Education

Advisor

Robinson, Randall S.

Subject(s)

Academic achievement; Education, Primary--Parent participation; Newsletters; Third grade (Education)

Disciplines

Elementary Education and Teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if students whose parents receive a parent weekly newsletter would perform better on a unit test than those students whose parents did not receive a parent weekly newsletter.

The sample in this study consisted of 48 students from a public third grade in southern New Jersey. The experimental group consisted of 22 students whose parents received a weekly newsletter for four weeks, from the teacher, about the current social studies unit being taught. The control group consisted of 26 students who were taught the same social studies unit by the same teacher as the experimental group, but whose parents did not receive the weekly newsletter.

A pretest and posttest were used to determine if the weekly newsletter improved the scores on the social studies unit test. In order to determine the amount of learning that occurred in each group, the raw pretest and posttest scores were calculated and the mean was derived for each group. A t-test was used to analyze the results and a two-tail test with a probability level of 0.05 was applied.

There was a significant difference between the experimental group who received the weekly newsletter and the control group, who did not receive the weekly newsletter. Therefore, the results of this study supported the hypothesis.

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