Susan B Neuman, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. This is an abstract of an article that appeared in Reading Research Quarterly, Volume 34, no.3

This study examines the impact of an intervention targeting economically disadvantaged children in child care centres. The program was designed to flood over 330 child care centres with high quality children's books, at a ratio of 5 books per child, and provide 10 hours of training to child-care staff. Conceptualised as a formative experiment, this study examined the project's impact, systematically sampling 400 3- and 4-year-old children randomly selected from 50 centers across 10 regions and 100 control children from comparable child care centres not involved in the project. Children's early literacy skills (receptive language, concepts of print, environmental print, letter name knowledge, concepts of writing, and narrative competence) were assessed prior to and following the study. In addition, a posttest-only sample and a kindergarten sample were included, focusing on the project's longer-term impact.

Changes in child care practices were assessed throughout the project, using photographic accounts of the physical environments of classrooms, literacy-related interactions between teachers and children in sample classrooms, and storybook reading activity in both treatment and control classrooms. Process measures indicated enhanced physical access to books, greater verbal interaction around literacy, and more time spent reading and relating to books as a result of the intervention. With greater access, children in the intervention group scored statistically significantly higher than the control group on four of six assessment measures, with gains still very much evident 6 months later in kindergarten. Findings provide powerful support for the physical proximity of books and the psychological support to child care staff on children's early literacy development.