Reading to young children in educational settings: A meta-analysis of recent research

This article reviews 10 studies, comprising 11 samples, of the effects of r eading to young children in schools. The age of the children varied between 31 and 90 months. Dependent variables were classified in 2 domains: oral l anguage and reading skills. The combined effect size for the oral language domain was d = .63, and for the reading domain d = .41. Although these figu res look promising, caution is needed because the empirical evidence appear s to be meager. Not only is the number of studies small, but a critical ana lysis of the design of the studies generally reveals poor quality.