According to The Nation’s Report Card on the NAEP website, nationally in 2015, “thirty-six percent of fourth-grade and thirty-four percent of eighth-grade students perform at or above the Proficient level in NAEP reading.” Surely this is an alarming national rate of reading proficiency. My driving question is to seek a correlation between independent, free reading, sometimes called recreational or pleasure reading, and reading proficiency. I believe the scope of the question has implications at all levels: international, national, state, district, and my own school and classroom level.
I have some comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one thinking that there must be a correlation, and by my hypothesis, a positive one. “Among the many findings reported by NEA is that reading for pleasure correlates strongly with academic achievement. Individuals who engage in reading for pleasure are better readers and writers than nonreaders. Children and teenagers who read for pleasure on a daily or weekly basis score better on reading tests than infrequent readers. Frequent readers also score better on writing tests than infrequent readers”(Gambrell, L. B. 2008). As I set out to find peer-reviewed articles and research articles to gain some insight into the international, national, or state findings, I keep running across one gentleman in particular, Stephen Krashen. Here’s my favorite quote so far - reasons to be divulged later. “IF THERE WERE A SUREFIRE WAY TO HELP KIDS BECOME MORE LITERATE, WOULD YOU IGNORE IT? Of course not. But that's exactly what's happening across much of our nation. Try searching the literacy information that's available from your state’s department of education, and you will be lucky to find a single mention of this method. Or peruse the National Reading Panel's 2000 report, a federally funded study of research-based reading practices, and you'll discover that this approach is scarcely mentioned. What technique am I talking about? It's called free voluntary reading, and it may be the only way to help children become better readers, writers, and spellers” (Krashen, S. 2006). I thought, surely it can’t be THAT ignored. Yet here I am, literally hours and hours later of searching educational research databases and I have found only a few relevant studies done within the past 10 years that are supported by detailed research. Here and there over the last 40 years you'll find a comprehensive study or survey, but nothing seems to have been recently. Even when you find a recent study, much of their background information dates back to the 1980's and 1990's. Mostly I find articles and blogs about teachers’ and parents’ own experiences. Yes, most of these articles are by experienced teachers and professors, and yes, their observations support my hypothesis, but there seems to be a scarcity of statewide or nationwide correlational research between reading for pleasure and academic outcomes on standardized testing for reading achievement. The greatest amount of recent research seems to revolve around language development in pre-reading children before entering school and the correlation of oral language acquisition to reading skills. There is little research on middle school and high school age students that connects reading outside of school to performance on reading tests. Perhaps I've stumbled on an area of research that needs to be more heavily examined. Certainly the lack of information on a greater scale only makes me more curious to see what my very localized research will find!
3 Comments
3/1/2017 09:54:20 pm
It seems that education has remained in the dark ages for many years. We have been jumping through loops and stepped up to writing, given government tests and really not studies our students to see if any of our teachings are working before we start another method of teaching again.
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Nai Saelee
3/2/2017 09:35:35 pm
Nancy,
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Dan
4/2/2017 10:46:29 am
I find this very interesting as my wife who teaches High School Spanish does a lot of reading in her lower and upper Spanish classes. She has always had silent reading, a book of the students choices for the first 15 minutes of class in her advanced classes but she is just now starting to do more in her lower classes. She has them read Fridays for 15 minutes but is thinking about having them read every day, books that are lower level reading. Your blog was really inhteresting.
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