At the 2024 ALA conference, the authors presented their exploration of the internet access challenges faced by graduate students at a STEM university in Ghana. This research highlighted how unreliable, expensive, and intermittent internet affects academic life, particularly for students off-campus. Despite the university's solid on-campus…

Historically, much of the Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on first-generation students (FGS) framed them using deficit thinking, emphasising what they lacked to be successful in higher education. In contrast, recent scholarship has turned to asset-based pedagogies, shifting the focus onto the strengths that FGS bring to college.…

Literacy exposure checklists that assess parental picture book knowledge (Parental Title Checklist [PTC] and Parental Author Checklist [PAC]) have been developed as proxy measures for literacy environments. Although previous research suggests that parental picture book knowledge is a strong predictor of language skills for preschoolers older than…

Introduction: This study examines the impact of the availability of reading resources in the school, the classroom, the home and the social environment on the reading proficiency of Grade Four primary school students in Hong Kong. Method: Data about the reading performance of Hong Kong students in the 2011 Progress in International Reading…

Reading is not only limited to students in boundary wall institutions, where all individuals cannot access easily. People belongs to poor family backgrounds cannot reach to these institutions for learning and reading while reading is for all, for the better understanding of life. Reading has its value being a source of knowledge and every…

England's Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP) commissioned the National Literacy Trust to conduct a survey at the start of a Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) project to improve reading in primary schools in the city. The survey was based on a questionnaire used nationally to gather responses from nearly 50,000 children and young people…

This study looks at the satisfaction of tertiary students with their institution's library services with the aim of identifying study and learning related impediments and challenges faced by students from poor backgrounds. A study of this type is important because educators need to understand that information technology adoption and implementation…

Globally, there is great interest in enhancing young children's literacy development as a route to improving worldwide literacy. To contribute to this area of interest, this paper reports findings from a multi-pronged early-literacy program designed to improve the print-knowledge of young children in Yucatec Mayan villages. The school-based…

Purpose: This study examines the extent to which the Home Literacy Environment (HLE) as measured by reading habits and resources, library use, and subscriptions or materials, as well as parental reading beliefs predict both language skills (i.e., vocabulary) at kindergarten and students' trajectories of growth from kindergarten (K) to grade 3…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the predominant factors contributing to low reading abilities of pupils at Elsie Lund Basic School in the Tamale Metropolis, Ghana. Purposive sampling technique was used to select twelve (12) classroom teachers of the Elsie Lund Basic School. The instrument used to collect data was one-to-one in-depth…

The emphasis on schools' providing reading materials for students at home is very much on the primary school years, when the skill of reading is being acquired. Little consideration has been given to the impact of curtailing school-mediated access to books beyond this point. Regular recreational reading offers a wide range of benefit, and is…

This research explored the effectiveness of the Raising A Reader (RAR) program on improving children's receptive vocabulary and improving parents' support of reading activities in the home. A total of 148 children in twelve pre-K classrooms were involved in this research study. In addition, parent surveys were conducted to determine if RAR…

Background: Numerous studies have investigated the relationships between various student, home and contextual factors and reading achievement. However, the relationship between such factors and reading attitudes has been investigated far less, despite the fact that theoretical frameworks of large-scale assessments and school effectiveness research…

This paper focuses on the attitudes towards reading in the home, handed down through the generations and experienced by the young children in four families of Pakistani and Indian origin. The children's families originally arrived in the UK in the 1960s, and this paper unpicks the stories and attitudinal changes in relation to both English and the…

In the past few years, people have come to realize that family and child well-being are public health issues. Helping families and children be happy, healthy and resilient helps the larger community. This report will discuss various aspects of family life including the systems that exist to support them, ways families can have more positive…