Investigação do ambiente de literacia e numeracia familiar em famílias brasileiras

Abstract

Preschool children encouraged to develop initial school-related skills in the home environment have better school performance, regardless of formal preschool education. Understanding the home learning environment requires the development of instruments to assess this construct. In Brazil, just a few studies focused on constructing questionnaires to measure Home Learning Environment, and none of them simultaneously assessing home numeracy and literacy practices were adapted and psychometrically validated. The Home Numeracy and Literacy Questionnaire (HNLQ) is an instrument that fullfils these requisites and that has been extensively used in the cross-cultural context. Therefore, this study has four main goals: a) to evaluate the content validity, cultural adequacy and understandability of a translated HNLQ version for Brazilian families; b) to psychometrically investigate the structure of the Brazilian-Portuguese adapted subscales of the Home Numeracy and Literacy Questionnaire (HNLQ) assessing Parental Attitudes and Home Activities c) to investigate associations among Parental Attitudes, Home Activities and parent’s mathematical and reading achievement; d) to investigate associations among Parental Attitudes, Home Activities, and children´s mathematical and reading achievement. This study reports some initial steps, part of a larger multicentric research cooperation. Forty-seven parents responded to a translated version of HNLQ, and were invited to participate in online discussion groups. Judges evaluated all queries and suggestions raised by parents during the discussion groups, and modifications were made to clarify and improve the understandability of the questionnaire. Two-hundred and sixty parents responded to the adapted version of two scales from HNLQ (Parental Attitudes and Home Activities scales) and the Brazilian Economic Classification Criteria (Brazilian Criteria). One-hundred and fifty-six parents also responded to a reading comprehension task and an arithmetic achievement task. One-hundred and four children were also assessed with single-word reading, reading comprehension, and arithmetic achievement tasks. Exploratory factor analyses, Pearson’s correlations and hierarchical regression analyses were conducted. Results suggested that the current version of the HNLQ is adequate to be employed in future studies, with larger and more representative samples, in order to more deeply investigate its psychometric properties. Further, this study suggests specific contributions of parental attitudes and performance in reading and mathematics in the home learning environment, as well as in children's school performance.