The Impact of shared book reading on children and their Families: insights from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis offers new insights into the impact of shared book reading on children and their families across five chapters. It investigates how shared book reading is associated with a child’s development in general, and how participation in a specific book gifting program - Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library - is associated with the home literacy environment, reading attitudes and interactions, and children’s emerging literacy skills.Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to shared book reading, the Imagination Library, along with the reasoning and theory that guide this thesis.Chapter 2 provides a systematic review with meta-analyses of the quantitative evidence for an association between shared book reading and child development outcomes. The results suggest that shared book reading is moderately and significantly associated with various developmental outcomes, particularly spoken language skills. The findings also reveal the complexities of measuring shared book reading and make recommendations for future research.Chapter 3 uses both quantitative and qualitative data to investigate the potential impact of the Imagination Library on families across an entire local government area in Australia (Tamworth). Analyses of the data indicated that children in the program were read to more often, for longer durations, and had more books in the home than the average Australian child. Further, early reading routines were established and maintained that are associated with a child’s emerging literacy skills. This chapter also explores qualitative findings which demonstrate the impact of the program across families and the greater community.Chapter 4 expands its focus to the potential impact of the Imagination Library in five countries around the world: the United States of America (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Analyses of quantitative data within and between countries suggest that children in the program are more likely to be read to, have more positive attitudes toward and interactions during shared book reading, and demonstrate more emerging literacy skills than children not in the program. In addition, caregivers are more likely to demonstrate positive attitudes toward and interactions during shared book reading than caregivers who are not in the program.Finally, Chapter 5 synthesises the key insights from the previous chapters and discusses the challenges across the research. This chapter makes recommendations for how future research can further explore the impacts of shared book reading in general, and the Imagination Library more specifically as well as demonstrating the importance of book-gifting from birth.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".