Research Happenings Carrie Byington, MD is the medical director of the University Clinic at South Main Public Health Center in Salt Lake City, UT. The clinic has been a ROR clinic for 10 years and serves primarily Spanish-speaking families. Carrie, Marissa Deiner, Phd., and their colleagues have designed, and received funding to conduct, a comprehensive evaluation of the ROR program on school readiness in 100 Hispanic children (half of them drawn from their own clinic and half from other similar clinics). They will evaluate parents' attitudes towards reading, home reading environment, the quality of parent-child reading interaction in the home, children's vocabulary and emergent literacy skills, and the kindergarten teacher's assessment of the child's literacy and school readiness compared to peers. The project began in 2007. Tara Berman, MD and her colleagues at the DuPont Hospital for Children and Jefferson Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA evaluated library practices of ROR families and their children. They administered a survey to 188 caregivers and asked them about ROR interventions in the office, reading activities in the home, caregiver education level and library use. Around 49% of parents reported bringing their children to the library: of these, 38% visited the library once a week or more; 36% once a month or more; 27% once a year or more. More than half of the families/children who did not visit the library gave the following reasons: lack of time, child too young, and already having enough books at home. Although nearly half of the parents who participated in the study visited the library, they also demonstrated the misperceptions that many parents have about age-appropriateness and purpose of the library.   Return