Books and reading important for a flying start to school

A large, national study has been tracking children since 2004. Susan Walker from the School of Early Childhood at QUT says that having books in the home and reading to infants and young children can have a big impact on the performance of a child starting school.

There is a short book that has inspired me to make a difference in children’s lives by thinking of the ways in which we can close the achievement gap. The title of the book is “Inequality at the starting gate”, and it provides a graphic picture of the ways in which some children are disadvantaged in their learning opportunities before they even set foot in school.

These initial inequalities do not disappear but are actually reinforced during the school years leading to a widening gap between advantaged and less advantaged children as they progress through the school system. If we want all children to excel and have the opportunity to succeed in school we need to think about how we can reduce these pre-existing inequalities.

One way to think about this is to consider the types of skills that children need to be able to make a flying start to school. A set of skills, collectively called executive function skills, are emerging as critical across the transition into full time schooling and for early academic achievement. Executive function skills incorporate working memory, the ability to shift from one task to another, for example switching from sorting objects by colour to sorting objects by shape, and the ability to purposefully inhibit behaviour. The game “Simon Says” is a beautiful example of an inhibition task where children need to stop themselves from following instructions unless “Simon” specifically tells them to. These skills can also be thought of as a form of cognitive self-regulation.

In our research, we explored the factors that might make a difference in children developing these executive function or cognitive self-regulation skills. We used data from Growing up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, a large, national longitudinal study which has been tracking children since 2004. We looked at some child and family characteristics when children were infants to see what predicted teacher-rated self-regulation skills when children were in their first year of school.

What we found was that girls and children from higher SES families did better. We expected this. But what was of most interest was the finding that, even when taking SES into account, the quality of the early home learning environment when children were infants made a significant difference to their ability to regulate their behaviour in the first year of school. Specifically, the number of books in the home and the number of minutes that children enjoyed being read to were significant predictors of their cognitive self-regulation, or executive function skills, six years later when they started school.

These findings are exciting as they indicate that such simple things as valuing reading, having books in the home and reading to infants and young children can make a big difference in helping children to achieve that flying start to school.