The varying relationship between New Zealand students’ attitude to reading and reading literacy achievement

Results from the 2006 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) show that for New Zealand’s Grade 4 students, those with a more positive attitude to reading tended to have higher reading literacy achievement (Chamberlain, 2007; Mullis, Martin, Kennedy, & Foy, 2007). However, in their analysis of PIRLS data English-speaking countries, Gnaldi, Schagen, Twist, and Morrison (2005), suggest that for Grade 4 students with low reading literacy achievement, the measure of attitude to reading requires careful interpretation due to those students’ difficulty understanding the items comprising this measure. This suggests the possibility of variation, with reading literacy achievement, in the relationship between attitude to reading and reading literacy achievement. The current study uses correlation curves (Bjerve & Doksum, 1993) to investigate this variation in New Zealand’s PIRLS 2006 data. It finds that, overall, the correlation between attitude to reading and reading literacy achievement varied substantially with reading literacy achievement. However, for students with reading literacy achievement between 0.5 and 1 standard deviations below the mean, and for those with reading literacy achievement just under 0.5 standard deviations above the mean, this correlation was lower than expected. This possibly indicates behavioral phenomena, test effects or a combination of both, and certainly indicates the need for further theoretical consideration and analytical work.