THE EFFECT OF ENCOURAGING PARENTS OF LEARNING DISABLED CHILDREN WITH READING DIFFICULTIES TO IMPROVE THE HOME READING ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of a training program to encourage the parents of intermediate school learning disabled students to make changes in the home reading environment that would assist their children in reading development. Twenty seven families volunteered to participate in the study, eighteen as participants who attended three meetings and nine as controls. At the meetings the importance of reading in the home, the selection of current books popular with adolescents and behavioral management techniques were discussed. These topics represent three broad areas of reading development in which home factors appear to influence. The study was designed as pre-experimental in the natural setting. The data was collected through questionnaires and reading exercises administered to the children--by their parents at the beginning of the study and sixteen weeks later. The data was analyzed by means of the t-test. Given the voluntary nature of the participation and the use of non-standardized instruments and procedures for data collection the results of this study must be interpreted with extreme caution. The results indicate that parents were willing to make changes in the home reading environment to assist their children in developing reading skills. However, the results of the children's performance on reading exercises indicated that the children of the participants did not increase their reading ability significantly more than the children of the controls during the sixteen week period.