Children who begin school with less knowledge in letter knowledge, phonological sensitivity, familiarity with rudiments of reading, and language ability are likely to have more difficulty learning to read. Additionally, parent involvement has been directly linked with reading achievement.

All of the sixty-seven four- and five-year-old children in the four classrooms in this study received a structured school-based intervention emphasizing explicit instruction in phonemic awareness paired with letter identification. Twenty-nine parents of children in the classrooms volunteered to participate in a home program that stressed phonemic awareness and letter identification through joint storybook reading and parent-directed activities that supported the classroom program. Thus, some of the children in the four classrooms received parent-directed instruction that supported that the classroom instruction.

Assessments from the Individual Growth and Development Indicators and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills were used for the investigation. When the four- and five-year-olds were combined and the two groups, the school intervention only (SIO) and school intervention with parent-directed instructed (PDI), were compared using ANCOVAs, the PDI demonstrated greater gains in Alliteration than the SIO. When the SIO and PDI were compared within their respective age groups, it was found that the five-year-olds had more significant gains than the four-year-olds. Both the four-year-old PDI group and the five-year-old PDI group made greater gains on Alliteration than the SIO group. Additionally, the five-year-old PDI group made greater gains on three other assessments: Picture Naming, Rhyming, and Initial Sound Fluency. The relationship between the participating parents' level of satisfaction and the relative gains of the PDI group was analyzed. Significant correlations were obtained on two of the measures: Alliteration and Initial Sound Fluency. The findings of this study indicated that school intervention with parent-directed intervention produced greater performance gains than school intervention only on four out of five measures of phonemic awareness.