Attitudes towards reading amongst kindergarten and Grade 1 children

The goals of the present study were to compare the reliability and convergent validity of two reading attitude measures for beginning readers and to get more insight into children’s reading attitude around the transition to formal reading instruction. 468 children in kindergarten and Grade 1 completed a more traditional questionnaire based on Aarnoutse’s (1990) Reading Attitude Scale and an alternative instrument based on Nielen et al.’s (2016) Picture Evaluation Task. Both measurements had adequate reliability for research purposes. Our analysis of the instruments' convergent validity suggested that the Picture Evaluation Task was a more appropriate task. Scores on the Picture Evaluation Task significantly correlated with reading achievement in Grade 1. Further, first graders had significantly higher scores on the Picture Evaluation Task than kindergartners, while no age effect was found on the Reading Attitude Scale. Differences in correlations between kindergarten and Grade 1 suggest that less able students’ reading attitude is negatively affected by initial difficulties in learning to read.