Empirical Evaluation of a Home Visiting Intervention Targeting Immigrant and Refugee Children

Ready2Learn is a home visiting program that strives to improve the developmental outcomes in children of recent immigrant and refugee families. The program educates the parents on developmentally appropriate activities that they can implement in the home to stimulate the development in their child. To this date, no researchers have evaluated the effectiveness of this program. Researchers collected data on the developmental outcomes at the start of the child's participation in the program and after six months of receiving the home visiting services by using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire. Developmental outcomes were collected for five different domains: Communication, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Problem Solving, and Personal-Social. The results demonstrated that there were 17 children who were close to the clinically concerning area of development in one of the five domains, and 11 children who were within the clinically concerning area in one of the domains. All of the children achieved developmental scores that were away from the clinically concerning area after six months of the home visiting program. A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant increase in the developmental scores for children with deficits in the Gross Motor domain, the Fine Motor domain, the Problem Solving domain, and the Personal-Social domain. These results demonstrate that the program Ready2Learn was effective in improving the developmental outcomes in children of recent immigrant and refugee families. The greatest deficit was found in the Fine Motor domain. Ready2Learn should provide more focus on developmental activities that target fine motor skills.