Demographic and geographic comparisons of young children's home literacy environments : a Canadian study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an investigation of the home literacy environments (HLE) of Canadian children that might support children's emergent literacy and later literacy development, how these are related to socioeconomic status, and how rural families might be characterized within the spectrum of family variations. In the initial study, 517 urban and suburban parents of children aged 4 and 5 completed questionnaires asking about various home literacy activities provided. Socioeconomic indicators predicted significant variance in the number of children's books in the home, shared reading days per week, the age at which parents first read to their children, and casual book activities (e.g., looking at books, watching parent print notes). Differences by maternal education were observed, with high school and college educated mothers reporting significantly fewer children's books, shared reading days per week, and casual book activities than university or postgraduate educated mothers. Maternal self-reported reading skill revealed itself to be a particularly important factor in the provision of the HLE. In Study II, 61 rural parents were matched by maternal education to 61 urban parents of children aged 4 and 5 so as to disentangle the contributions of geography from SES in the provision of the HLE. Rural parents reported having significantly more children's books and first reading to their children at an earlier age than did urban parents. Both groups highly valued literacy in preparing children for their futures, viewed their own influence as important, and were equally divided on whose responsibility it was to teach their children to read. Correspondingly, no differences by geography were noted in the frequency of parental involvement with the school. Overall, the findings indicated that SES continues to be a relevant factor to include in studies of the HLE and that rural is not synonymous with disadvantage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".