Mai Zaru: Storybook Reading Practices for Children from Low Income Families

This literature review describes effective features of storybook reading practices captured across three decades. The selected studies consist of (a) randomized control trials and quasi-experimental studies, (b) participants from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and (c) an age range of 2 to 7 years old. The selection of studies began with an exploration of two education databases and later cross-referenced with a manual search of storybook reading interventions approved by the Institute of Educational Science (IES). In the seven well-cited studies was a collection of classics published as early as the 1990s, with a total of 735 students, researchers reported the use of similar video-training techniques across. While read aloud interventions were found to have profound impacts on students' achievement across different types of implementers (teacher, parents, and researchers), many students remained unresponsive to storybook reading interventions. Finally, the differences detected across this small scope of studies made it challenging to compare their methodological rigor; however, implications and directions for future research are described in greater depth.