Do Book Giveaway Programs Promote the Home Literacy Environment and Children’s Literacy-Related Behavior and Skills?

By Merel G. de Bondt, I. Willenberg, A. Bus. Review of Educational Research, 2020

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Book giveaway programs provide free books to families with infants to encourage caregivers to begin reading to their children during infancy. This meta-analysis of 44 studies retrieved from 43 articles tests the effects of three major book giveaway programs: Bookstart (n = 11), Reach Out and Read (n = 18), and Imagination Library (n = 15). Effect sizes were aggregated within two domains—home literacy environment and literacy-related behavior and skills—before being averaged across studies. The findings corroborate the assumption that book giveaway programs promote children’s home literacy environment (d = 0.31, 95% CI [0.23, 0.38], k = 30), which subsequently results in more interest in reading and children scoring higher on measures of literacy-related skills prior to and during the early years of school (d = 0.29, 95% CI [0.23, 0.35], k = 23).

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9a746c47f0409fa77c303b00540c78156762b7f