READING TOGETHER HELPS NAPLAN LITERACY
PARENTS can boost the NAPLAN scores of their young children by reading to them at home, a new study has found.
Going to preschool also helps boost children’s reading levels, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute research shows.
The results of the study of 5000 Australian children comes as one in four children have poor reading skills by the time they are eight or nine.
Lead researcher Professor Sharon Goldfeld, director of the Centre for Community Child Health, found children who were read to from the age of 2 to 5 years and who attended preschool had lower odds of poor reading outcomes.
This was the case even after adjusting for the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage.
“Early home reading experiences can provide children with opportunities to learn and practise specific language and reading skills, as well as to form regular reading habits,” Professor Goldfeld said.
She said preschools offered children “cognitively stimulating and rich early learning environments” which can “promote stronger school achievement”. “It’s reassuring that some things can be done to address the equity gap,” Professor Goldfeld said. But she said there were “no silver bullets here”.
Even allowing for more reading and preschool attendance, an 18.3 per
cent gap in ability between advantaged and disadvantaged children remains.
Professor Goldfeld said action was
needed to “ensure kids of the Covid generation can be healthier than past generations”. She has recently been awarded a $475,000 Australian
Research Council Linkage Project for the Changing Children’s Chances program aimed at reducing the effects of disadvantage.