Pelletier – home and child literacy measures

The Family Literacy Project is ongoing but we have had some, we have first and second year cohorts and we use the same methodology for research as we used in a previous study. That is we collected pre-test data on the children and on the families. So here was, a very important piece of the project was to look not just at how an intervention program can affect children’s literacy development, but how does it affect home literacy practices. So we took very detailed measures of home literacy practices. How often do you read to your child; what kinds of books, how much television, what kind of television, how often do you go to the library, how often do you read. And we gave parents a little quiz about children’s book authors and book titles including some that were foils so that parents would only check off the ones they would recognize.  

So that kind of thing we did with parents. And with children we used the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Test of Early Reading Ability and an early writing measure. Those were our three child literacy measures. So we took those measures before and again after the program, several months after the program had finished. And we compared those families, not on the home literacy because we didn’t have home literacy for our control group, but on the children’s gain scores with the control group and again found greater gains for children who were English language learners although all children gained but the gains were greatest for that particular group.