According to a recent study done at Boston College, not only are Canadians leading the way in reading comprehension, and they have their parents to thank.

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or PIRLS, which was released in December, showed that students in Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia and British Columbia were amongst the best readers within the 40 countries studied.

“Canadian students as a whole fared quite well,” said Pierre Foy, the Director of sampling and data analysis and one of the researchers at Boston College. “Amongst the five participating provinces, four of them were near the top and [only] Quebec was lacking behind.”

The study looked at fourth grade students from a variety of backgrounds, and included private, catholic and other religious and language based schools in the country. The organization gathered a collection of experts from around the world to help evaluate the students, and it was then that they decided that the fourth graders were the ideal subjects.

“Education relies heavily on children being able to read to then move on to learn all the other subjects,” Foy explained. “At this point children have learned the basic skills for reading and are ready to move on to use the reading skills in learning other subjects.

“As we like to say they're transitioning from learning to read to reading to learn.”

The study, Foy explained, is done in the hopes that the research will be taken into consideration by the respective governments, the public as well as other researchers will continue their work.

“We generally produce relatively straight forward statistics that hint at the kind of relationships between background information and achievement,” Foy continued. “And it's our hope that people then use the database to expand in that secondary analysis.”

But it wasn't Canada's results that were surprising, it was the influence the parents had on their student.

The questions were not only directed towards the students however, as all teachers, school directors and parents were all questioned about what goes on at home, how reading is taught in schools and how educational resources are allocated.

“The most striking result is how influential what goes on in the home is, especially before children enter school,” said Foy. “For example, parent's who say that they've shown the alphabet, numbers, read to them, done bed time stories, all before going to school- their children seem to do far better than when that doesn't happen.”