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Does Reading to Children Enhance their Educational Success?

Short- and Long-Term Effects of Reading to Children in Early Childhood on their Language Abilities, Reading Behavior and School Marks

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Abstract

Drawing on two unique German datasets, we explore the possible short- and long-term effects that reading aloud in early childhood has on children’s language abilities, their reading behavior, and their school marks in kindergarten and at the end of both primary and secondary school. By applying propensity score matching, we found a positive effect of reading on the language abilities of preschool children and of students at the end of primary school. Additionally, a high frequency of reading to children in early childhood positively affects their own reading behavior. However, differences in reading in early childhood appear to be unrelated to school marks in the subject of German language at the end of primary school. Furthermore, we found no long-term effects of reading among secondary school leavers. Overall, our results confirm positive immediate and mid-term effects, but hardly any long-term effects, of reading to children during their early childhood.

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Notes

  1. Due to the multifaceted nature of the HLE concept, concentrating on its influence on children’s outcomes is a useful attempt when aiming to explain as much of the variance in the dependent variable as possible.

  2. To measure informal literacy activities Sénéchal and colleagues develop a construct of the book title checklist (Sénéchal et al. 1998; Sénéchal and LeFevre 2002). Parents are shown a number of existing and fictional titles of children books and asked to differentiate between them. This measure is used to reduce possible response bias due to social desirability. According to the researchers, such measurement of the reading frequency is superior to a direct question. However, it remains unclear whether the book title checklist is really a valid measure for the frequency of reading aloud or whether it is affected by or similar to other “home literacy” aspects. These studies are therefore also considered to analyse the effect of the HLE rather than the specific effect of a high frequency of reading aloud.

  3. Note, however, substantial panel attrition observed in their data.

  4. Both, the interview as well as test instructions were conducted in either German or Turkish according to the preference of the parents and children. However, answers to the vocabulary test had to be provided in German by all children.

  5. Please note that only the dependent variable (vocabulary knowledge) varies in the analyses. The treatment variable (reading aloud), as well as all covariates, are taken from wave 1 in both analyses. Thus, we estimate the lasting effect of reading aloud frequently at the beginning of kindergarten.

  6. Additionally this dataset includes immigrant families from the former Soviet Union. To enhance comparability between the two datasets, we only use data on the German native families and the families with a Turkish immigration background.

  7. Whereas most of the ninth-graders attended comprehensive school (61 %) or lower secondary school (29 %), most of the tenth-graders were either in comprehensive school (48 %) or intermediate secondary school (46 %).

  8. To retain a high number of observations, all children that participated in at least one test are considered. If the analysis is reduced to children with test scores at both points in time, the results remain similar.

  9. While some studies show that in high income families parents spent more time reading to their children (Bradley et al. 2001; Karrass et al. 2003; Zick et al. 2001), others do not support this finding (Kitterod 2002; Yarosz and Barnett 2001).

  10. We also report results of the conventional regression analyses (OLS regression and Linear Probability Models, depending on the nature of the outcome variable) to validate our PSM findings. In these regressions, the same set of covariates is applied as in the probit regression of the PSM.

  11. Please note that we estimate the total effect of reading aloud on the various child outcomes. This total effect includes the direct as well as any possible indirect effect of reading aloud in early childhood on the outcomes at a later point in time.

  12. In our analysis we report the average treatment effect in the whole sample (ATE), encompassing average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) and the average treatment effect of the untreated (ATU).

  13. Furthermore none of the covariates differ significantly after matching between the group of children who were read to frequently and those who were read to less often. Please note that balancing tests were conducted and sufficient for both the ATT as well as the ATU allowing to interpret the ATE. Results are not presented but are available upon request.

  14. Results of the OLS and Linear Probability regression models are presented in column five of Table 2. As can be seen results of these estimation procedures differ only slightly from PSM results. Our discussion will hence pertain mainly to the results of the PSM model, since its assumptions are less restrictive and it closely follows our general theoretical framework.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for funding our research and the collection of the data used in this study. We would also like to express our heartfelt thanks to Michael Gebel, Clemens Kroneberg and Harald Beier for their helpful comments and advice on an earlier draft of the paper. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the useful comments that we received when presenting the paper at the “Research on Family Demography and Children’s Lives: Future Directions and Infrastructures” conference in Stockholm. Finally we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers.

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  1. University of Mannheim, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), Mannheim, Germany

    Oliver Klein & Irena Kogan

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  1. Oliver Klein
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  2. Irena Kogan
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Correspondence to Oliver Klein.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Overview of the variables used in the analyses
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Table 4 Descriptive results, beginning of kindergarten
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Table 5 Descriptive results, end of kindergarten
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Table 6 Descriptive results, primary school
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Table 7 Descriptive results, secondary school
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Table 8 Mean standardized bias before and after matching
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Klein, O., Kogan, I. Does Reading to Children Enhance their Educational Success?. Child Ind Res 6, 321–344 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-012-9174-2

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