Comparing the Home Literacy Environments of Children with and without Learning Disabilities

The goal of this study was to compare the home literacy environment (HLE) of children with and without learning disabilities (LDs). Participants were 1,090 children with LDs and 1,000 children without LDs from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort of 2010-2011 (ECLS-K:2011), a nationally representative sample of U.S. children entering kindergarten in fall of 2010. Parents were asked five questions about the informal home literacy environment (HLE) their children experienced the summer before kindergarten. Confirmatory factor analyses yielded three main results. First, the five questions loaded on a single informal HLE factor. Second, the factor structure of informal HLE was identical for the LD and non-LD samples. Third, the mean of the informal HLE factor for children with LDs was .208 (p .001) standard deviations lower than that for children without LDs. It appears that when entering kindergarten, prior to formal reading instruction or LD identification, LD students already have less exposure to literacy and text than their peers without LDs.