Early Childhood Research: Same Books, Different Experience

How preschool children experience picture books is affected by their mother's education level and by who is reading to them, says Jane Torr, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, in Australia.

She conducted a study in which books were read to children by either their mothers or preschool teachers.  The sessions, which all involved the same two picture books, were audiotaped, and Ms. Torr later analyzed the children's verbal interactions during the readings.

Children whose mothers had earned college degrees engaged "with the text by making inferences, generalizing, explaining, and asking questions about the phenomena they encountered," she writes.

Whether they were in preschool or at home made little difference in how children of college-educated mothers related to the text, she says, but the story was very different for children whose mothers had left school at 15 or 16 years of age.

Those children, when read to by their mothers, spoke less and interacted primarily by naming things they saw in the pictures, she says.  However, when they were read to by college-educated preschool teachers, the children "interacted more around the texts and made connections between the written text and their own personal memories, their likes and dislikes, and other texts that they had encountered," she writes.

"The findings suggest that the experience of reading the 'same' picture books is very different for the different groups of children," she writes.  And the results "provide strong support for those who claim that children of early-school-leaving mothers should have access to quality child care."

The article, "Talking About Picture Books: The Influence of Maternal Education on Four-Year-Old Children's Talk with Mothers and Pre-School Teachers," is available online to members of subscribing institutions from the August issue of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.  Information about the journal is available at http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=242

From the Council of Higher Education