Home literacy environment at age 4 and its determinants and relation with reading comprehension at age 9

• In Event: Parenting and children´s socialization context in Chile: evidence on attachment, cognitive stimulation, and family functioning

Abstract

This study (a) determines which child, mother, and parental context factors are associated with membership in four home language and literacy environment groups (HLLE: labeled teaching letters, books and talk, high HLLE with high probability of implementing the activities of the two previous groups, and low HLLE) found in a Chilean low-SES sample of 53-month-old children (n = 1409; Authors, 2020), and (b) describes how reading comprehension trajectories manifest in elementary-aged children from said groups in second and fourth grades.
To respond to (a), we used data from a self-report questionnaire given to mothers when their children were beginning pre-kindergarten. From parenting context, we incorporated the variable reporting single parenthood. For mothers’ characteristics, we included: (i) mothers’ educational level (5 categories); (ii) parental cognitions: expectations regarding the difficulty with which the child will learn to read (3 points, from very difficult to easy); and belief about age at which it is best to begin reading to children (5 points, from 0-1 to 5-6 years). For children’s characteristics we considered (i) prosocial behavior reported by educators via questionnaire (Gresham & Elliott, 1990) and (ii) task orientation, captured using a questionnaire completed by an evaluator (Smith-Donald, et al., 2007) following a battery of developmental tests given to each child. A chi-square test was used to explore the relation between HLLE group membership and the aforementioned factors. For the significant relations, we used log-linear analyses to determine which combinations of the categories yielded the links (Bakeman y Robinson, 2013). For children’s characteristics, the Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted to explore whether these differed in accordance with the HLLE groups.
To respond to (b), data from the 1,409 cases were linked to scores on a Chilean standardized reading comprehension (RC) test (SIMCE) given in Grade 2 (n=965 cases, with an average of 7 years of age) and Grade 4 (n=854 cases, with an average of 9 years of age). Two multi-level multiple regression models were estimated (one to predict the RC score in second grade, and the other to predict the score in fourth grade), inputting control variables for the child and educational level of the mother, as well as the HLLE group membership predictor.
We found that the mothers from the high HLLE group are more likely to have post-secondary education, to believe that it will be easy for their children to learn to read, and to believe that a good age to begin reading to children is between 0 and 1 years of age. Likewise, the children in this group exhibited more prosocial behavior and task orientation. The opposite pattern was found for the low HLLE group (Table 1). Moreover, we found that the high HLLE and books and talk groups present higher scores on RC, both in second and fourth grades. In second grade the effect size of the difference between the high and low HLLE groups averages rises to 1 standard deviation (Table 2). Implications of these results are discussed to inform early intervention for children from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

Authors

• Mayra Mascareño Lara, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (UG/RUG)
  Presenting Author

• Susana Mendive, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniela Aldoney, Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jose Pezoa, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erika Hoff, Florida Atlantic University
  Non-Presenting Author