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Chapter 3
Literacy-related Activities
in the Home
Abundant research evidence has established that early exposure to literacy
activities is a key element of later reading achievement. To expand on the
information available from PIRLS 2001 and to measure changes during the
intervening 5-year period, PIRLS 2006 collected information from parents
about their child’s experiences in learning to read, literacy resources in the
home, their own reading, and the language(s) spoken in the home. PIRLS 2006
also asked the fourth-grade students themselves about their reading activities
at home and at school. Chapter 3 presents parents’ and students’ responses
to a subset of these questions.
The parents’ data were collected using the Learning to Read Survey,
in which PIRLS 2006 asked the parents or primary caregivers of each child
participating in the study to provide information about their child’s experiences
in learning to read. When information from the parents’ questionnaires is
being reported, it is always presented as an attribute of the student, so that the
student is the unit of analysis. That is, the data are shown as the percentages
of students whose parents reported on various activities or events. Using
the student as the unit of analysis makes it possible to describe students’
early literacy experiences and is consistent with the PIRLS goal of providing
information about the educational contexts and performances of students.
Although, for reporting purposes, the information provided by parents
was linked directly to students, parents sometimes did not complete the
questionnaire given to them. When more than 15 percent of the students