Carlson, Bitterman, and Jenkins (2012) Were Interested

Carlson, Bitterman, and Jenkins (2012) were interested in the effects of home literacy environment on a sample of preschool children with disabilities. Home literacy environment refers to a number of conditions that foster the development of reading and writing skills in children. Carlson et al.

(2012) reviewed the previous research findings and determined that the frequency that parents read to their children (joint reading) has dominated this research and findings and generally finds that a significant amount of the variance in reading achievement, literacy, and language abilities can be treated to joint reading of toddlers and preschoolers.

They also discuss two major categories of home literacy experiences: formal literacy experiences (activities in which parents actively teach children to read and write) an informal literacy experiences (joint reading or reading story books focusing on the story rather than the reading skills). The research has generally found that informal literacy experiences explain a significant amount of variance in areas like receptive language and vocabulary, whereas formal literacy experiences explain significant amounts of variance in domains like decoding skills and letter knowledge.

As children get older parent involvement has a more limited but still important influence on the child's reading skills. However, Carlson et al. (2012) note that the research on home literacy environments and children with disabilities is lacking due to having small samples, low incidence disabilities, and other flaws. It appears that less positive beliefs about literacy in children disabilities may contribute to parental involvement based on their research review.

Because the home literacy environment in preschoolers with disabilities may differ in both its effects and potential for children the researchers emphasized the need for research on home literacy environments for these children. While the theoretical foundation is clearly described and adequately defines the variables and relationships between them for normal developing children, there is little development regarding the types of disabilities that home literacy environments may affect.

The researchers use the word disabilities to discriminate broad range of potential issues and home literacy environments most likely have differential effects depending on the disability of the child (e.g. developmental delays, deafness, visually impaired, etc.) and not just the severity of the disability. Perhaps the researchers could have investigated the research on specific types of disabilities and developed some more pointed hypotheses. B., C. And D.

There are three research questions in this study: (1) How do home literacy activities and scores on a home literacy scale vary by demographic variables such as age, parental education, race, and severity of the disability, etc. (2) Does home literacy environment predict vocabulary and reading comprehension among these children? (3) Do the predictive relationships between home literacy environment and vocabulary and reading comprehension differ for disabled children based on the severity of their disability? Given the researchers' earlier literature review these three research questions are adequate and relevant to warrant further study.

However, the first research question: do formal and informal activities (home literacy) as measured by both continuous variables and categorical dependent variable(s) based on five home literacy variables commonly cited in the research) vary by a number of different demographic variables (treated as independent measures) involves so many statistical analyses that the potential for Type I error is quite high.

The second research hypothesis is that home literacy environment (now treated as an independent variable[s]) will predict vocabulary and reading comprehension achievement scores on a standardized reading measure (both dependent variables that are discrete ratio-level variables that are the sums of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test -- III and the Woodcock -- Johnson III Passage Reading Comprehension subtest).

The third hypothesis is that the score on a measure of disability (Abilities Index, treated as a moderator variable and transformed into a dichotomous [categorical] variable) will affect the relationship between home literacy environment in the after mentioned reading comprehension and vocabulary variables. These last two research hypotheses were tested with linear regression analysis. The hypotheses are clearly stated, adequately reflect the research questions, and certainly relates to the theories described in the literature review.

The variables are adequately defined and operationalized based on standardized and accepted clinical tools or measures used in the previous research; however, there are issues with the number of variables to test the first research hypothesis. E. There are a number of interesting findings in this study. One of the most interesting is that the home literacy environment was not predictive of reading and comprehension skills for children rated with moderate to severe disabilities. Another is that home literacy was a.