Closing Canada's rural/urban literacy gap : National strategy for early literacy

National Strategy for Early Literacy Closing Canada’s Rural/Urban Literacy Gap Canadian Council on Learning Canadian Council on Learning Closing Canada’s Rural/Urban Literacy Gap A Report Prepared by the Canadian Council on Learning for The Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network August 29, 2008 The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of the Canadian Language and Literacy Re [...] Coulombe and Tremblay’s (2005) work has shown that the distribution of literacy skill within nations is economically important and that increases in literacy can foster prosperity most effectively by raising the level of skill among those who find themselves at the lower end of the skills distribution. [...] This pattern of intergenerational illiteracy is particularly important in the context of rural/urban differences in literacy achievement because adult literacy skills tend to be weaker in rural areas than in urban areas. [...] That is, given a rural student and an urban student whose parents have the same levels of education and the same occupational status, the urban student will still outperform the rural student in literacy. [...] In both cases, the data consisted of school level variables including the number of students eligible for exams, the number of students fully participating in the exams, and the number of students who met or exceeded expectations.