Scher, & Mackler, 1997; Bronfenbrenner, 1974; Grimmet & Mc Coy, 1980; Purves, 1973; Spiegel, 1981). We also found that parents with a more positive attitude towards reading had children with better reading literacy skills, and the influence of this variable was higher in schools with lower reading literacy performances. Furthermore, we found that parents who undertook such literacy activities with their children as reading books, telling stories, singing songs, playing with alphabet toys, word games, writing letters/words, and reading signs and labels aloud before their children entered elementary school were found to have children with better reading literacy skills in fourth grade. Nevertheless, fourth graders who visited the library or a bookstore with their parents on a regular basis performed lower on the Reading Literacy Test. Also in contrast to what we expected (e.g., Baker et al, 1997; Wigfield & Asher, 2002), parents who read more frequently for information had children with lower reading achievement.
Finally, in keeping with the results of earlier studies (e.g., Cummings, 1984; Lambert & Tucker, 1972; Van Elsäcker, 2002), students who speak the language of
instruction at home have been found to outperform students who do not speak this language within the home environment.
School-level Predictors
Within the schools of the student, class size was found to play an important role: Students in larger classes performed better on the Reading Literacy Test. This is not in line with one might expect based on common sense and research (Pritchard, 1999; Robinson, 1990; Watling, 1996). One possible explanation may be that larger classes generally occur in larger schools with many facilities like remedial teachers and additional reading programs. Another explanation may be that small classes generally occur in rural schools with less financial possibilities. Finally, teachers in smaller classes may be less active because they are less challenged. In addition, the economic background and the home language of the school population were found to play an important role. We showed that students in schools with many students coming from economically disadvantaged homes or speaking another language at home than at school performed lower. Given that parental education and home language were controlled for, this effect cannot be attributed to the individual backgrounds of the students. The nature of the school population has also been found to influence the literacy performance of students in previous studies (e.g., Overmaat, Roeleveld, & Ledoux, 2002; Westerbeek, 1999).
Our two studies on reading literacy in industrialized societies showed conflicting results with respect to the total number of instruction hours per school year. In our multilevel analyses, this variable did not significantly contribute to the explanation of the variance in reading literacy, whereas in our regression model for European countries, it was found to be the most important school predictor. However, it hardly correlated with reading literacy (positive in two countries and negative in one country), which lead us to conclude that the number of instruction hours does not
play an important role in reading literacy of individual children, which of course does not refer to the content of instruction. In addition, our regression model for European countries showed that children in schools where reading literacy skills are
emphasized during the earlier grades become better readers than children in schools where this occurred later. However, this variable was not taken into account in our multilevel model due to outliers and extremely high PIRLS weights, which led to unreliable results.
Reading Literacy in Top-performing Countries
In Chapter 6, we showed the reading literacy outcomes of the five PIRLS top- performing countries to be significantly predicted by ten of the international success factors described by the IEA. The fact that the five countries greatly differed with respect to their socioeconomic backgrounds did not call for separate models. Like in industrialized countries, a couple of student-level predictors were shown to play an important role in reading literacy. Child reading and home reading climate clearly played the most important role in the prediction of reading literacy. Children who read more for fun and had more positive reading attitudes performed best on the RLT. This finding is in line with the results of earlier chapters and earlier studies (Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Rowe, 1991; Verhoeven and Snow, 2001). Home language was also an important predictor in the top-performing countries. Furthermore, the presence of a newspaper in the home played an important role in top-performing countries. The children in homes with a daily newspaper presumably saw their parents reading more often than other children, and thus probably saw the application of such specific reading skills as skimming, scanning, recognition of writing styles, and justification of text content more often as well. Like the presence of a newspaper in the home, the presence of a computer in the home significantly predicted reading literacy. Both are frequently taken to reflect the socioeconomic background of the family. However, the results of a factor analysis showed both variables to be independent predictors. Students with a computer in the home performed better on the RLT than students without a computer in the home. In addition, the results of our study showed the length of preschool attendance to predict reading literacy outcomes (cf. Stewart, 2004). The fact that children in preschool are generally surrounded by reading and writing materials and often undertake such activities with peers may explain the development of better reading skills among such children. The initial stages of learning to read are crucial for the future development of children’s reading skills.
Rather surprisingly, one of the most important predictors of reading literacy in top- performing countries was a school-level variable. As in the analyses of the industrialized countries, schools with a positive school climate (i.e., where the principals were positive about teachers’ job satisfaction, teachers’ expectations with regard to student achievement, parental support for student achievement, student