Predictors of Literacy and Attitudes Toward Reading Among Syrian Refugee Children in Jordan

Abstract

Refugee children often face disruptions to their education before and during displacement. However, little is known about either levels or predictors of refugee children’s literacy or about their attitudes toward reading in low- or middle-income countries. To address this, we conducted in-home literacy assessments using the Holistic Assessment of Learning and Development Outcomes with 322 Syrian refugee mother–child dyads who lived in Jordan (child age range 4–8 years, M = 6.32 years, 50% female). Overall, the children had quite low levels of literacy, although they indicated a strong enthusiasm for reading. Child age, maternal education, and maternal ability to read all predicted child literacy, although maternal literacy predicted it only among children enrolled in school. Among those enrolled in school (64.9% of the total sample, 88.7% of those aged ≥ 6), students attending hybrid classes had better literacy than those attending either solely in-person or solely online, although the frequency of school attendance did not predict literacy. A less consistent pattern emerged for predicting children’s attitudes toward reading. Our results suggest an urgent need to improve literacy skills among refugee children in Jordan, as well as a need for validated measures of attitudes toward reading for use with Arabic-speaking youth.

Pathways to resilience and pathways to flourishing: Examining the added-value of multisystem research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement

“…It has promoted a top-down interventionist mindset with limited room for local voices and local agency. A memorable starting point for highlighting the unintended consequences of a crisis mindset is recounted in the parable of the monkey and the fish (Elmer, 2002, p.14). The parable tells this story:…”

“…To robustly evaluate this model, Taghyeer invited US and UK scholars to seek funding for evaluating its interdisciplinary and intergenerational effects. Some of this research focused on assessing multi-level influences associated with Syrian refugee children's literacy and attitudes toward reading (Hadfield et al, 2022). This led to examining whether Syrian children's war-related trauma was associated with avoidance or sustained attention to anger or threat (Michalek et al, 2022), which together with research conducted with Afghan adolescents (Mirabolfathi et al, 2020), suggested that affective working memory capacity can be a promising target for intervention.…”

The effects of war, displacement, and trauma on child development

“…Regarding refugee children in neighboring countries, more than 800,000 children did not have access to schools (UNICEF, 2019). One of the first studies of literacy among Syrian refugee children showed that Syrian children living in Jordan (4-9 years) had low literacy-and expressive language skills, despite the fact that most of the children had positive attitudes toward reading and were enrolled in school (Hadfield et al, 2022) 3 .…”