The roles of the variables of student attitude student self-concept and preparatory literacy teaching activities on the prediction of the reading performance of the Iranian 4 th grade students

This article reports the results of a study on the role of student's reading self-concept, preparatory literacy activities, student and parent attitude to ward reading on reading literacy performance based on PIRLS 2006 data. Data from 5179 fourth grade Iranian students (2767 boys and 2412 girls) who participated in PIRLS 2006 were analyzed using the path analysis. The scales used in this study are taken from reading background questionnaire for parent's attitude to ward reading and primary literacy activities variables, student questionnaire for reading self concept and student attitude to reading variables, and reading literacy total scores based on Rasch model. Findings show that the model under examination has goodness of fit with data. All effects of parent's attitude to reading on other endogenous variables were confirmed. In addition, all effects of primary literacy activities on other endogenous variables were found to be significant. None of the effects of student's attitude to ward reading on reading literacy performance was significant. In order to distinguish equality of boys’ and girls’ models, testing of the equality of models was used. Results demonstrated that out of 8 paths in models, differences of 4 paths were significant. These paths were: student's reading self-concept to reading literacy performance, parent's attitude to reading to primary literacy activities, primary literacy activities to student's reading self-concept, and student's attitude to reading to ward reading literacy performance.