The Association Between a Home Reading Program and Young Children’s Early Reading Skill
Journal of Direct Instruction
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of teaching parents to deliver a carefully sequenced reading program to their kindergarten children who were not receiving formal reading instruction in school. Forty-five children and their parents enrolled in a kindergarten in a university-sponsored primary school participated in the research. Approximately twice as many children who participated in the home reading program scored in the top quartile of the Woodcock Reading Mastery (WRMT-R) word identification and word attack subtests as might be expected based on the test norms, while the children in the control group approximated the expected norms. On curriculum-based measures, the average score of children in the home reading group was higher than 87% of the children in the control group. Finally, a multiple regression analysis revealed that a significant proportion of the variance in children’s posttest performance was associated with their pretest scores on the WRMT-R letter identification subtest scores, their knowledge of the phonemes introduced in the curriculum and the consistency with which their parents implemented the home reading program. The results are discussed relative to previous research in which teachers implemented the curriculum and the issues associated with utilizing parents as primary beginning reading teachers. In addition, limitations of this research and suggestions for future research are provided.
Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Findlay, P., Major, J., Gilberts, G. & Hofmeister, A. (2001). The association between a home reading program and young children’s early reading skill. Journal of Direct Instruction, 1, 117-137.