Annotated Bibliography

Article Report

“Single Parenthood and Children’s Reading Performance in Asia” is an article written by Hyunjoon Park. In this article, Park examines the gap in reading performances between 15-year-old students that live in single-parent families and, and compares them to other 15-year-old students in intact families. His study compares 5 Asian countries, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand, to the United States. Park wanted to know why the association between single parenthood and children’s education vary across countries. To answer this question, Park collected and analyzed data from the Program for International Student Assessment. The dependent variable for this analysis was the students’ performance on reading literacy, and

The final results indicated “…that in Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, student’s socioeconomic background accounts for substantial part of the negative effect of single parenthood” (Park 873) However, if the socioeconomic backgrounds were held constant, then the students in single-parent families outperform the intact families. As for the size of the family, turns out that the United States had more students in single-parent families with more siblings than in those who were in intact families. The Asian families showed that the size does not differ between the two types of families, which did not significantly affect the education

Final results showed that “ Asian countries show a relatively narrower educational gap between students in single-parent and intact families, in contrast to the significant disadvantage of growing up with a single parent in the United States” (Park 874). This study covered the education and family chapters in our book. I thought Park covered this study very well. The way that he broke down each section was very helpful. I also think that by surveying a variety of schools helped keep the data fair. One weakness that was in the data came from the limitation from the collected data on single parenthood. The information was not specific if the single parenthood resulted from widowhood, divorce, or an unmarried birth. These causes could have affected the students from single-parent families differently, which could cause the data to be altered. Overall this is a very nice study, and because of it I now know that family structures affect reading performances the United States more than in Asian