Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses on the development of reading behavior, attitudes toward reading and reading competences

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Maximilian Pfost
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283644364

An effective handling of written information is needed in order to participate in social, economic, and cultural life of modern societies. Starting before students attend the formal education system, the development of reading competence is a quite long lasting process, which goes on until young adulthood and beyond. Although reading literacy is primarily acquired in schools, influences and learning opportunities outside school are increasingly acknowledged as being also important for the development of reading skills. Of major importance from this perspective seem to be learning opportunities and experiences created by the students themselves, especially students' own extracurricular reading activities. The primary aim of this research project is to analyze different research questions on the role of informal learning experiences, the role of parents and the interaction between students, parents and school learning opportunities for the development of reading attitudes, reading behavior and reading competences. In accordance with theoretical models explaining individual differences in school competence development with regard to family characteristics we created a new research framework for our analyses. This new model conceptualizes the development of reading attitudes, reading behavior and competences by taking a large set of explaining variables into account. On the one hand, this model considers structural characteristics of the family, like socio-economic background, as well as on the other hand family process characteristics like reading related communication within the family. Furthermore, reading behavior and attitudes toward reading are conceptualized multi-dimensionally. For example, reading behavior is split up into several categories like the reading of books or the reading of journals and newspapers. This seems to be a necessary approach as empirical research has provided evidence which shows quite different relations between reading behavior and reading competence for different types of reading behavior. Finally, further variables like students' individual characteristics or school and instruction characteristics are considered. Using longitudinal datasets, this project aims at testing successively different parts of our developmental model of attitudes toward reading, reading behavior and reading competences.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Cordula Artelt