Comprehension and metacomprehension in preschoolers from low and middle-socioeconomic status families
Abstract
Objectives: The aim of the study is to investigate reading comprehension and metacomprehension as they occur in preschool age in relation to sociocultural environment of the family, in comparison with traditional predictors of beginning reading acquisition represented by several indicators of phonological awareness. Participants and setting: A group of 327 preschool-age children from middle-SES families and 55 children from low-SES families was compared.
Hypotheses: We assumed that children from low-SES families would perform worse than children from middle-SES families namely in literacy tasks requiring specific social experience with reading, i.e. text comprehension and metacognitive monitoring. Statistical analysis: The differences between the groups were tested using independent samples t-tests, monitoring accuracy on the correct and incorrect answers using the Chi-Squared test, and the relationship between monitoring accuracy and performance in the two text comprehension tasks using 2-way ANOVA.
Results: We have found that children from low-SES families demonstrated significantly lower overall performance in all literacy tasks, however, the group differences in text comprehension varied in relation to the task difficulty (complexity and the level of comprehension). Moreover, in metacognitive monitoring, children from low-SES families showed significantly higher tendency to underestimate their correct performance, indicating lower self-esteem.
Study limitations: The main limitation of the study was the lack of information about everyday reading behaviour of children except the one exhibited in our tests. In the study that will follow we plan to employ the questionnaire aimed specifically on assessment of usual reading behaviour of both, children and parents.