Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Food For Thought Program
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Dr. Christina Weiland will serve as co-PI on a new project to evaluate the effectiveness of the Food for Thought program (FFT), a culturally-informed family literacy program for low-income Latino kindergartners and their parents that aims to improve child language and literacy outcomes through family food routines such as cooking and grocery shopping.
Dr. Diana Leyva at Davidson College developed the intervention and serves as Principal Investigator. Dr. Leyva and colleagues previously tested the feasibility of FFT and found evidence of potential efficacy (Leyva & Skorb, 2007). The new project will examine FFT's impact via a random assignment study involving 17 public elementary schools and over 1,000 children and their parents in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district (NC). Dr. Weiland, Educational Studies Ph.D. candidate and IES Predoctoral Fellow Anna Shapiro, and IES Postdoctoral Fellow Gloria Yeomans-Maldonado will conduct the quantitative analyses for the project. The project is funded by the Brady Foundation.
