Jared Anderson, Weber State University
We are partnering with Project Head Start in a northern Utah school district to evaluate the effectiveness of their License to Read program, which is part of the Fathers Involved Shaping Head Start (FISH) initiative. The way fathers tend to naturally engage their children when reading has been shown to help them think critically about literature, connect it to their waking world, and even help cultivate social-emotional development. The program’s goal is to get fathers to spend more time reading with their children, increase self-efficacy of the fathers, and get more books in the home. The present research is a secondary data analysis in which we are searching for correlation between measures of father involvement with the program and corresponding routine assessments of child literacy growth. Involvement is measured by the number of reading licenses turned into individual classes, as well as the number of hours the fathers and father-figures participate in FISH activities.