Developing Reliable and Valid Measures to Assess Children’s Reading Habit – New Evidence from Recent Studies Conducted in India and Bangladesh

• In Event: Exploring Assessment Practices and Educational Equity in Diverse Contexts

Proposal

Research documents a well-established link between children’s habit of reading and their literacy skills (Baharuddin, et al. 2015; Schmidt and Retelsdorf, 2016; Verplanken and Orbell, 2003). However, there is still a lack of consensus on how to assess reading habits and the merits of such assessments. Few measures go beyond the frequency and time spent on reading to account for important individual and household-level factors such as reading motivation, parental engagement, and the availability of reading materials at home (Davidson and Jukes, 2015; Schmidt and Retelsdorf, 2016; Wagner, 2002). Concurrently, resource-strapped education systems in the Global South struggle to promote children’s reading habits due to large classroom sizes, a lack of access to high-quality, contextually relevant reading materials, and teacher capacity constraints (Kim et al., 2016). To fill this gap, an NGO with which the authors are employed, is implementing a child-friendly school library program in nine countries worldwide. The program is adapted to each country context, but is generally organized around six elements, which include: 1) creating print-rich literate environments; 2) provision of developmentally appropriate and culturally relevant reading materials; 3) scheduled time for children to engage in reading activities in school or classroom libraries; 4) professional development on library management, reading activities, community engagement and program sustainability; 5) family and community engagement activities; and 6) government engagement to design, implement and sustain the quality of the school or classroom libraries (Author, 2019).
To better understand the impact of its library program and address a key measurement gap in the sector the NGO has been developing a children’s Habit of Reading assessment tool. Through these efforts, the NGO is challenging the status quo that supporting children’s literacy skills development is sufficient and paramount to instilling their love for, and habit of reading, which is in alignment with this year’s conference theme. This tool aims to reliably measure primary grade children’s reading behaviors at school and at home, their joy of reading, and their intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivations. This tool was initially pilot tested in a small sample of schools in Sri Lanka in 2019 and, more recently, through a larger exploratory study in Vietnam with 300 grade 3 and 5 children in 2022 (presented at CIES 2023). The learnings from the Vietnam pilot exercise were promising and the results from applying both Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item-Response Theory (IRT) analytical approaches indicated that overall, the tool was quite reliable (Cronbach Alpha of .806). Moreover, through factor analysis the authors found that the first identified factor could explain 44% of the total variance in the data, and this factor described a child’s average position on habit of reading index. However, it was also found that further refinements to a few individual test items within the self-efficacy and joy of reading at leisure constructs and new information from its application in other countries could further help in improving its reliability and in understanding the relevance and utility of the tool in other contexts.
Considering these results, the NGO has further adapted and contextualized the habit of reading assessment tool for use in new studies that assess its school library program in India and Bangladesh. Leveraging data from these new studies, the authors will expand upon its previous IRT analyses to examine to what extent the tool can be used to reliably measure children’s reading habit in different contexts. During the presentation, the authors will discuss the findings, which together aim to address the following research questions: 1) does the tool produce reliable and valid measures of primary grade children’s reading behaviors, joy of reading, and reading motivation in different contexts; 2) what are grade 3 and 5 children’s self-reported reading behaviors, attitudes and motivations towards reading in these contexts; 3) what are the key school, individual and household-level factors that may influence children’s reading habit that could be explored in future studies; and 4) what is the relationship, if any, between children’s habit of reading and their early grade literacy skills (Bangladesh study only).
To answer these exploratory questions, the authors will utilize children’s habit of reading and other associated data from several distinct studies, including but not limited to: 1) a mixed method end of project review examining the fidelity of implementation, program sustainability and children’s habit of reading in a sample of intervention schools in Nashik district of Maharashtra, India; 2) a mixed method study examining the effectiveness of its cluster library program in primary schools in Bellary district of Karnataka, India; and 3) a one-time cross-sectional study that examines differences in children’s habit of reading and literacy skills between intervention and comparison schools in Natore district of Bangladesh. In these studies, the habit of reading assessment tool will be administered to a sample for 300 to 800 grade 3 and/or grade 5 children across locations. While the data analysis for the Nashik study is currently underway, the data collection for the Bellary and Natore studies will be conducted in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2023, respectively.
The authors hypothesize that these recent adaptations and contextualization’s to the habit of reading assessment tool will lend additional evidence to practitioners on how we can assess primary grade children’s reading behaviors and attitudes in a reliable and valid way. It is also expected that the results will further galvanize interest and support within the international education sector to think beyond the typical literacy skills assessments to develop new innovative measures that assess the other individual, household and school-level factors that are critical for developing lifelong readers.

Authors

• Pinaki Joddar, Room to Read

• Rebecca Alice Westbrook, Room to Read