Background/Context: Both correlational and experimental evidence suggests that having access to books can be a key resource for accelerating the literacy outcomes for children. Results from a 20-year study across 27 nations by Evans, Kelley, Sikora, and Treiman (2010), suggest that children growing up in homes with many books obtain 3 years more…

It is desirable that children engage in reading and writing beyond school. What is known about various individual and environmental variables that may be related to children's leisure reading and writing? And how strong is existing evidence? Our scoping review aims at mapping research on leisure reading and writing in first- to fourth-graders.…

There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a…

Whereas cognitive and linguistic factors for learning to read have been extensively studied, less is known about affective factors including children's attitudes toward reading. Studies primarily from English-speaking and Western countries show gradual declines in reading attitudes in elementary school (McKenna et al., Reading Research Quarterly…

Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot determine how individual components work alone or in…

The Matthew effects suggest that children who struggle when learning to read are less likely to read for pleasure later in life compared to children who ease into reading quickly. One aspect of early literacy instruction that might hamper reading progress is learning to read simultaneously in two languages. Despite the long-lasting and widespread…

Traditional definitions of reading seem inadequate in today's world as children encounter and interact with electronic screen-based reading using handheld devices such as tablets, smart phones, and so on. This study builds upon the context of reading engagement for pleasure and targets Malaysian bilingual children at the early stage of learning to…

Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot determine how individual components work alone or in…

This study examines associations between leisure reading and reading skills in data of 2,525 students followed from age 7 to 16. As a step further from traditional cross-lagged analysis, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to identify within-person associations of leisure reading (books, magazines, newspapers, and digital…

Reading logs have become a practice in many elementary schools. Although lack of autonomy undermines intrinsic motivation (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), no study has examined the effect of logs. Second and third-grade students (N = 112) were assigned either a mandatory or voluntary log and surveyed about their motivation to read at…

The present study investigated the reading attitude of struggling elementary students at risk for reading failure. Twenty-nine first-grade and 32 second-grade struggling readers were given the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (McKenna & Kear, 1990). First-grade struggling readers favored more academic reading activities while second-grade…