Sustained Effects of Participation in Imagination Library

Abstract

The Imagination Library (IL), an organization
which promoted literacy by mailing high quality,
age-appropriate picture books to newborns
each month until they were five years old.
Parents enrolled the children in the program
and responded to annual surveys about family
literacy practices. According to the self-reported
results of the surveys, parents read
aloud more often to their children after receiving
the books in the mail. The school effects of
this additional time with exposure to books were
tested by this researcher. First graders were
grouped by their enrollment in the IL program.
Two groups of 15 students were chosen randomly
from the total group of 80 first graders; a
group which participated in the IL program,
and a group that did not participate in the program.
The first-grade Dynamic Indicators of
Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) test was
used to measure these specific competencies:
letter naming, phoneme segmentation fluency,
nonsense word fluency, and oral reading fluency,
which included speed, accuracy, and comprehensions
of the main idea. Fourteen sets of
test scores were compared to find the difference
between the mean scores of the two groups. Using
an analysis of variance with a = .10, the
mean scores of the IL students were found to be
higher, but not significantly higher, on all the
subtests except two. The grade level competency pass rate was also compared for the two groups. The IL pass rate for grade-level requirements was 72 percent while the pass rate for non-IL students was 55 percent.