Relationship between the socio-economic status of family, reading activities at home, self-concept and attitude of students toward reading with reading literacy performance of the students (based on PIRLS studies, 2006)

The present research was an attempt to investigate the role of socio-economic status of family, reading activities at home and student related variables (self-concept and students’ attitudes toward reading) in reading literacy performance based on PIRLS studies (2006). PIRLS has been applied a three-stage stratified cluster design sampling method. After filtering the data, the research samples included 5411 students studying at the fourth grade of elementary school have participated in PIRS test. The used tools in PIRLS 2006 were reading literacy questions and a questionnaire. The used scales in this study were taken from reading background questionnaire for socio-economic status and reading activities at home, students’ questionnaire for self-concept, students’ attitudes toward reading and reading literacy. Total scores were based on Rasch model which was used structural equation modeling aimed to study direct effects, indirect effects and total effects of socio-economic status variable (exogenous variable) on reading activities at home, self-concept and students’ attitudes towards reading (endogenous variable). After confirming the latent variables, measurement models and fitting the structural complex model, the results showed that the surveyed model has got the required goodness of fit with the data. All effects of socio-economic status on the other endogenous variables were statistically significant. In conclusion, the results suggested that socio-economic status has a significant role in determining and predicting reading progress. Besides, due to the remarkable amount of the obtained variance from endogenous variables, the finding of this study can be applied to educational programs by researchers and all those involved in education.