The Berlin parent-child reading program: Conceptual design and evaluation

We investigate the effects of a new parent-child reading program designed to foster reading skills in the family context. The program aims to provide students with implicit training in strategies and processes of text comprehension, to practice these skills, and to have long-term effects on reading literacy. To this end, parent-child communication on selected texts was structured and guided by relevant tasks and questions. A total of 509 grade 4 students from 15 Berlin primary schools participated in this first evaluation study of the program with a pre/post control group design. Participation proved to have positive effects on prerequisites of reading and on specific components of reading literacy. Participants showed particular gains in terms of vocabulary development and text-related metacognition. In the latter case, the effect could be traced back to the program's particular effectiveness for weak readers, as reflected in the interaction between baseline level and group membership. Participation in the program did not have direct positive effects on performance on a standardized reading comprehension test, on decoding skills or on reading motivation, however. Overall, our findings show that a structured intervention within the family setting has largely untapped potential as a means of promoting reading literacy.