Paper details

Paper authors	Kristin Hadfield
In panel on	Impacts of war and displacement on refugees’ educational trajectories
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Community-led, shared book-reading interventions can improve early childhood development and reduce inequity. One such program, We Love Reading (WLR), was developed and implemented in Jordan and involves mothers reading stories to children. We evaluated the efficacy of WLR at improving literacy and promoting love of reading (primary outcomes) as well as impacting family dynamics (secondary outcome) through a wait-listed cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) during COVID-19. We sampled 322 Syrian refugees and their 4-8-year-old children (50.0% female) in Amman and Zaatari refugee camp prior to taking part in the intervention and then immediately after. Children’s literacy was evaluated using direct assessment, whereas love of reading and family dynamics were evaluated using self-report survey data from mothers and children. We have finished data collection and are now in the process of analysing these data using mixed ANOVAs. This paper will be the first presentation of the results of this RCT. These findings will allow us to understand the role of a relatively light-touch, shared-book reading intervention in influencing children’s educational trajectories during displacement, providing a potential model for how we can effectively intervene to promote child literacy and positive attitudes toward reading in other humanitarian crisis contexts.

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