An Investigation of the Mediating Role of Various Variables in the Effect of Both Gender and Economic, Social and Cultural Status on Reading Literacy

Abstract

The present study was based on the Turkish sample in PISA 2009 and PISA 2018. To investigate the effect of both gender and economic, social and cultural status index on reading literacy, the causal mediation effect was utilized in order to test the mediating role of the following variables: enjoyment of reading, the metacognitive strategy of summarizing, and the metacognitive strategy of reading and comprehension. With respect to the effect of the variable of gender on reading literacy, it was revealed in the present research study that all the variables utilized in the study had a statistically significant partial mediating role in the variable of enjoyment of reading, which was the strongest mediator variable. As for the effect of the economic, social and cultural status on reading literacy, it was revealed that there were statistically significant variables that played a mediating role; however, as these variables contributed very little to the explained variance, these variables were concluded to have no mediating role.