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The problem
Intervention: Reading books during elementary school (fourth grade)
Who it was tested with: Japanese elementary school children (n=3,136; ages 9-10 at baseline), including subgroup living in poverty.
Children or communities are compared with a group that did not receive the intervention, or followed over years. This is the design that best separates what the intervention did from everything else that changed.
"we used all fourth-grade elementary school students and their caregivers' follow-up data (n = 3,136 9- to 10-year-olds; follow-up rate: 87%). Poverty and the number of books read in fourth grade were assessed at baseline. Child resilience in fourth and sixth grade was assessed by caregivers using the Children's Resilient Coping Scale." This is a prospective longitudinal design with baseline and follow-up measurements, making it stronger than pre-post studies, though without a randomized comparison group it remains observational.
Observational design limits causal inference; resilience measured by caregiver report only; unmeasured confounding variables could explain the association between reading and resilience; results may be specific to the Japanese context.
Across countries and designs
1 study · 1 country
