Hong Kong attained the top place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011, an international study of reading achievement, which arouses keen interest in understanding the reasons behind this remarkable achievement. Although factors associated with reading achievement in English have been widely studied, similar studies…

This paper examines the relationships among the quality and quantity of parent-child shared book reading (SBR) engagements and children's reading and mathematics outcomes in preschool. Additionally, we explore how child and family characteristics predict the quality and quantity of SBR. Quantity was measured using parental reports of the frequency…

We present three statistical methods for causal analysis in life course research that are able to take into account the order of events and their possible causal relationship: a cross-lagged model, a latent growth model (LGM), and a synthesis of the two, an autoregressive latent trajectories model (ALT). We apply them to a highly relevant…

We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian…

In response to growing research and policy interest in the developmental contexts of early literacy, this study examined relations between neighborhood socioeconomic well-being, home literacy (parent-child shared reading and number of books at home), and directly assessed early literacy outcomes among 551 Head Start students in the fall of…

E-books and e-Reading Devices (E-RDs) markets have been enlarged due to the rapid progress of digital technologies. What are the possible factors to increase readers' willingness to use electronic devices? To improve the predictive value of the original TAM model, this study incorporates three additional constructs to form e-Reading Device…

The unauthorized duplication of books through photocopies and Internet downloads, especially in the case of academic books, is currently one of the most challenging problems facing the publishing industry. Photocopying has become widespread with these texts, apparently without major ethical concerns on the part of students. The purpose of this…

This collection of diverse conference papers discusses work in the traditions of factor analysis, ordinal psychometrics, structural equations, and some special purpose models for the analysis of change. It is a useful source, but does little to link the psychometric framework to general developments in statistics and other disciplines. (SLD)