Projects > Pennsylvania State University


With just under 40,000 employees on 24 campuses spread throughout most of the state and an annual budget of $3.4 billion, Penn State is a large and powerful institution. It is a land grant university with an Outreach system that touches 5 million people in all 67 counties in the state of Pennsylvania each year. It is also one of the leading research institutions in the country, with a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary research carried out by a variety of institutes and consortia.
 
The Engaged Institutions project at Penn State is a community-based primary research project to test the effectiveness of a school readiness intervention. The intervention is a home-based program for kindergartners that emphasizes parent-child reading activities along with softer parenting skills relating to educational support. It is a randomized-controlled trial to be implemented in three diverse communities across the state of Pennsylvania, all of which face economic stress and have disproportionate numbers of children that are ill-prepared to enter school: Mifflin County School District, Harrisburg School District, and School District of Lancaster. Children that show signs of low school readiness will be asked to participate, along with their parents. FOCUS is managed by the Children, Youth and Families Consortium, a consortium that supports interdisciplinary research and teaching in this area of work.