Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Reader Organisation's Get Into Reading Intervention

The British Picture Vocabulary Scale: Third edition (BPVS3) will be administered to children baseline, 4 weeks, and 6 months after intervention. The BPVS3 assesses a child's receptive vocabulary; for each question, the researcher says a word and the child responds by selecting a picture from four options that best illustrates the word's meaning.

The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - Preschool 2 UK (CELF Preschool-2) will be administered to children at baseline, 4 weeks, and 6 weeks after intervention.The CELF Preschool-2 is a published measure of linguistic knowledge of individual children which measures a broad range of language skills in young children. Specifically, we will use three subset tests from the CELF Preschool-2. The "sentence structure" subset will measure the children's understanding of simple and complex sentence structures. A sentence is read to the child and the child chooses, from a set of pictures, which picture ''goes with'' that sentence.The "word structure" subset measures the children's understanding of simple and complex word structures. A sentence is read about a particular picture and the child is asked to finish the sentence.The "expressive vocabulary" subset evaluate a child's ability to label pictures of people, objects, and actions.

The Parent Child Questionnaire contains 78 items and assesses: satisfaction with parenting, parent's interaction with and knowledge of his or her child, parent's perception of how he/she communicates with a child, parents' experience of disciplining their child, parent's ability to promote a child's independence and parents' attitudes about gender roles in parenting.

The Family Questionnaire records relevant demographic information (e.g. socio-economic status, parents' education, family language use, ethnicity, children's medical history) that was devised for the Economic Social Research Council funded United Kingdom Communicative Development Inventory study. This allows us to create a composite individual socio-economic background variable using maternal education and household income in order to identify high and low socio-economic status families and to confirm that the participant children are typically developing monolinguals.

The Family Reading Questionnaire examines frequency of storybook reading, reading requests and child library visits, number of books and children's books in the home, parental reading habits, reading onset, and frequency of parent teaching behaviours about reading, such as teaching about print knowledge (e.g. how often do you teach your child how to print words/read words?) questions about book choice (e.g. books read in the last week, child's favourite book).

The Children's Title Checklist indirectly measure a child's storybook exposure by assessing the parent's knowledge of children's book titles (Children's Title Checklist). The Children's Title Checklist consists of 40 titles of popular children's books and 20 foils.

The Children's Author Checklist indirectly measures a child's storybook exposure by assessing the parent's knowledge of authors. The Children's Author Checklist consists of 40 names of authors of popular children's books and 20 foils.

The Reader Organisation's Baseline Questionnaire assess parents' attitudes towards reading and barriers towards reading.

The Reader Organisation's Follow Up Questionnaire assess parents' attitudes towards reading and barriers towards reading. Parents are also asked questions about their own experience of the intervention itself.

The Leuven scale will be used to assess the child's active engagement during videoed dyadic book-reading sessions. There are 5 levels of engagements: extremely low (e.g. the child shows hardly any activity), low (e.g. the child shows some degree of activity which is often interrupted), moderate (e.g. the child is busy the whole time, but without real concentration), high (e.g. there are clear signs of involvement, but these are not always present to their full extent) and extremely high (e.g. during the observation of learning the child is continually engaged in the activity and completely absorbed in it).