Article 1st (Reading Enjoyment and Reading skills: Lesson From an Experiment with First Grade Children)

The role of parents in the early formation of human capital is an important topic, but largely unresolved in the educational economy. When children with low SES levels don't have high parental acceptance rates, policy makers may wonder whether (and how) schools, or other outside interventions, should try to compensate for this. This article applies this question to the issue. Some literature suggests that the sense of reading for more is developed among high SES children, who seem to be the result of home environment and attitudes toward books and reading, while the same children tend to have higher reading abilities. Based on controlled experiments, they measure a very intensive and formalized impact after school interventions aimed at conveying to first-graders a sense of reading, in a way that mimics what happens in some families (reading books, playing with words, etc.). The data show that the program is able to improve reading tastes, and change the general attitude of students to school and schoolwork. However, there is no indication that this translates into higher reading abilities, either during the program year, or during the next year. Psychological literature has long argued that children begin to learn to read before starting primary school, mostly through interaction with their parents.

If this assumption is correct, the results may be interpreted as reflecting that parental support at age 6 can not act as a substitute for parental support from birth to age 6. Parental support at 6 years of age may help to develop a child's appetite for reading at they begin to learn to read, but experiments show that relatively late appetite (read) like this is not necessarily followed by capacity building to learn how to read. Overall, we can not exclude that there are some complementary forms of reading pleasure and learning ability of atage 6, however, if any, it doesn't seem strong enough to make reading pleasure a relevant path to improve reading performance. Another reason why such intensive after class intervention is meaningless is that it comes with a reduction in the amount of aid given to students at school, by teachers, after class.


Annisa Masnasuri Kesai
16611069
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