researchers demonstrated a clear relation between students’ reading self-concept and reading skills, this variable did not play an important role within our final model (e.g., Baker, Afflerbach, & Reinking, 1996; Schunk & Rice, 1984).
With respect to the child’s home environment, two important factors emerged. First, children who lived in homes with a large number of books, access to a computer, and access to a newspaper had better decoding and language skills and were more motivated readers than children without such reading resources at home. This is in line with earlier research showing that children with a good home reading
environment develop good reading literacy skills (e.g., Leseman & De Jong, 1998; Rowe, 1991; Van der Voort, 2001). The second important home factor was the degree of parental involvement in school activities. We showed the frequency and quality of the communication between parents and the schools to be directly related to the children’s language and reading skills, in accordance with Epstein (1991) and Grolnick, Ryan, and Deci (1991).
Two school-level factors appeared to be important predictors of Reading Literacy in the Netherlands. In line with Chrispeels, Castillo, and Brown (2000), students in classes with a positive classroom climate (i.e., infrequent bullying, hurting, and theft) had relatively high decoding skills and were motivated readers. We showed that classroom climate is of particular importance for decoding skills and reading
motivation of children whose parents had little or no education and were born outside the Netherlands.
Also at the level of the school, the team climate was found to be an important predictor. Allington and Johnston (2000) already emphasized the importance of respectful, supportive, and productive communication between both students and teachers. In our study, a positive team climate was characterized by a positive teacher attitude towards the students, as well as a good team spirit, teacher job satisfaction, and a principal who is able to encourage teachers.
Reading Literacy in Industrialized Countries
Chapters 4 and 5 include our search for the most important reading literacy predictors in industrialized countries. With information from PIRLS 2001 about children’s reading literacy performances and backgrounds, it was possible to gain insight in the influence of a country’s reading level on reading literacy performances of individual children. The effect of factors on respectively school-, class-, and student-level has also been studied.
Variance on Different Levels
One of the most important findings of this dissertation was that variance in reading literacy is mainly found at the level of the student and also partly at the level of the school. Class and country accounted for virtually none of the variance in reading
literacy. Nevertheless, the results of our multilevel analyses in Chapter 5 showed the variance at all levels to be significant, which means that omission of a particular level in the multilevel analyses would result in variance being falsely attributed to another level (Hox, 2002; Kreft & de Leeuw, 1998). Our model of European industrialized countries (Chapter 4) also indicated that the contribution of a country’s reading level to children’s reading literacy performances is probably usually overestimated. After taking into account the predictor variables, the country’s reading level accounted for only three percent of the total variance in reading literacy. The average reading level of a country compared to other European industrialized countries did not have much impact on reading achievement of young children, once conditions for trouble-free reading development have been fulfilled. It therefore, seems more useful to study important student- and school-level predictors to be able to fulfill these conditions.
Student-level Predictors
Firstly, student’s reading self-concept was found to play the most important role in the explanation of variance in reading literacy scores in industrialized countries. This is in line with results of earlier studies (e.g.,Baker, Afflerbach, & Reinking, 1996; Schunk & Rice, 1984). However, this finding is in contrast with the model of the Dutch context where reading self-concept did not predict reading literacy significantly. Interestingly, reading motivation did not contribute to the variance in reading literacy in the industrialized countries while this was one of the most important factors in the Dutch context. On average, children’s reading motivation in the Netherlands was the lowest of all industrialized countries, whereas their reading self-concept was above the average of the industrialized countries. Maybe, reading motivation becomes more important for children with low reading motivation on average, and reading self- concept becomes less important in turn.
Next, students who read for fun or watched television outside school more often had a higher reading achievement. Even though time spent watching television may reduce the amount of time available to read books (Van der Voort, 2001), television watching appears to improve children’s reasoning and text interpretation. The association of computer use with reading literacy was more complicated: Occasional computer use appeared to affect children’s reading literacy skills positively, whereas too little or too much computer use affected their reading-literacy skills negatively. It is certainly possible that students who spend too much time on the computer perform lower simply because they do not have time to read (cf. Lankshear, 1997), whereas some computer use probably improves computer-literacy skills, which in turn night improve their learning in other areas (cf. Tapscott, 1998).
With respect to home climate of the students, the number of books in the home was found to influence reading literacy most substantially. The effect cannot be attributed to its relation to parental education, as parental education was controlled for in our multilevel approach (Chapter 5). Moreover, parental education was an independent significant predictor in our regression model (Chapter 4). A long history of reading literacy studies has already shown that the extent to which reading opportunities are