Developmental Psychology 1994, Vol. 30, No. 5, 679-689 CoDvriKht 1994 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/94/S3.00 A Picture Book Reading Intervention in Day Care and Home for Children From Low-Income Families Grover J. Whitehurst, David S. Arnold, Jeffery N. Epstein, Andrea L. Angell, Meagan Smith, and Janet E. Fischel The effects of an interactive book reading program were assessed with children from low-income families who attended subsidized day-care centers in New York. The children entered the program with language development in standard English vocabulary and expression that was about 10 months behind chronological age on standardized tests. Children were pretested and assigned randomly within classrooms to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) a school plus home condition in which the children were read to by their teachers and their parents, (b) a school condition in which children were read to only by teachers, and (c) a control condition in which children engaged in play activities under the supervision of their teachers. Training of adult readers was based on a self-instructional video. The intervention lasted for 6 weeks, at which point children were posttested on several standardized measures oflanguage ability that had been used as pretests. These assessments were repeated at a 6- month follow-up. Educationally and statistically significant effects of the reading intervention were obtained at posttest and follow-up on measures of expressive vocabulary. According to the 1991 Carnegie Foundation for the Advance- ment of Teaching report, Ready to Learn: A Mandate for the Nation, 35% of children in the United States enter kindergarten unprepared to learn, with most lacking the vocabulary and sen- tence structure crucial to school success. Although there are some problems with the methods of this report and inherent difficulties in dichotomizing school readiness, there is no doubt that there are very large individual differences in early educa- tional achievement that have long-term consequences for chil- dren and society (Alexander & Entwisle, 1988; Stevenson & Newman, 1986). Why are so many children, particularly those from low-in- come families, deficient in the skills that are critical to school readiness? Children's preschool experience with books may play an important role. Adams (1990, p. 85) estimated that a typical middle-class child entersfirstgrade with 1,000 to 1,700 hr of one-on-one picture book reading, whereas the correspond- Grover J. Whitehurst, David S. Arnold, Jeffery N. Epstein, Andrea L. Angell, and Meagan Smith, Department of Psychology, State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook; Janet E. Fischel, Department of Pediatrics, SUNY at Stony Brook. Preparation of this report was supported by grants to Grover J. Whitehurst from the Pew Charitable Trusts (91-01249-000) and the Ad- ministration for Children and Families (90CD095701). The research was supported by a grant to Grover J. Whitehurst from a private foun- dation that prefers not to be identified publicly. Views expressed herein are ours and have not been cleared by the grantors. We express our deepest appreciation to the day-care centers whose cooperation enabled the conduct of this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grover J. Whitehurst, Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794-2500. Electronic mail may be sent to russ@psych 1 .psy.sunysb.edu. ing child from a low-income family averages 25 such hours. Ninio (1980) found that lower-class mothers were less likely than middle-class mothers to engage in a number of potentially instructive behaviors during story time. Correspondingly, lower- class children in her sample had smaller productive vocabu- laries than middle-class children. McCormick and Mason (1986) demonstrated large social class differences in the avail- ability of printed materials in the home. For example, 47% of public-aid parents of preschoolers reported no alphabet books in the home, compared with 3% of professional parents. Feitel- son and Goldstein (1986) found that 60% of the kindergartners in neighborhoods in which children did poorly in school did not own a single book; in neighborhoods characterized by good school performance, kindergartners owned an average of 54 books each. Heath (1983) described a lower socioeconomic sta- tus (SES) community in the South in which adults read to chil- dren infrequently and in which reading by oneself was frowned upon; people who did so were thought to be antisocial. Teale (1986) found that book reading to children was very unevenly distributed across 22 low-income families he visited in San Diego. Book reading occurred four orfivetimes a week in 3 of the homes, whereas in the remaining 19 homes it occurred only aboutfivetimes per year. Teale's study is important because it makes the critical point that children's individual environments vary substantially within social class categories. It is the exis- tence of such variation and potential for change within econom- ically disadvantaged families that is the basis for intervention efforts, including those that are described in this study. Supporting these descriptive studies of relations between so- cial class and literacy activities are correlational studies that demonstrate associations between early book reading to chil- dren and later academic performance. Wells (1985) showed that the frequency of listening to stories between 1 and 3 years of age 679 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.