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Research shows that self-directed reading for pleasure beats homework or study as a driver of academic progress.
In a recent article published in the Bookseller, Sian Bayley quoted the chief executive of the School Library Association, Alison Tarrant, as saying that “the full functioning school library […] does reading for pleasure but also does reading for learning and information literacy”.
Guess what? There is recent evidence showing that “reading for pleasure” makes a strong contribution to both “learning and information literacy” and language and literacy development.
First, language and literacy development. Those who do more self-selected reading, as many of us know, spell better, have larger vocabularies, better grammar, write better, and of course read better, and several studies confirm that pleasure reading has a stronger effect on literacy development than formal "study" does. This has been widely documented, including in my book, The Power of Reading, 2004. One example from a paper I wrote alongside Shu-Yuan Lin and Fay Shin considers the case of "Sophia", a secondary school student once classified as limited English proficient but eventually considered fluent in English. Her school administered an English reading test at the beginning of each academic year as well as the end, expecting an improvement over the course of the school year. Sophia, however, got worse, scoring lower in the spring than she had in the fall. But when she took the test again in the following fall, her score was clearly higher than it was in the fall the year before.
What did she do over the summer? Self-selected reading for pleasure in English, from books she found in the local public library, averaging about 50 books each summer. Early favourites were the Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley High series, after which Sophia moved on to the Christy Miller series and other books by Francine Pascal. No book reports, and no "study". According to Sophia’s mother, Sophia was so busy with school work during the school year that she had very little free time for pleasure reading. Her mother joked that it might be a good idea to keep her daughter home during the school year so she could continue to improve on standardised tests of reading.
Self-selected pleasure reading shows promise of being a very efficient and pleasant way to stimulate...literacy and language development. If so, full-functioning school libraries are far more valuable than we ever thought.
In addition to the positive effect of pleasure reading on language development, we now know that self-selected pleasure reading is an important source of knowledge. Those who read more, know more. The breakthrough study in this area was done in 1993, by Stanovich and Cunningham (Journal of Educational Psychology 85, 2: 211-229). The subjects were first and second-year university students in the US who were administered a series of tests designed to cover a number of topics, including science, social studies, current events, personal finance, health, “daily living technology,” cultural knowledge and “multicultural literacy”.
An example of a finance question was, “What is the term for the amount of money charged for a loan and calculated as a percentage of that loan?”; a science question was, “In what part of the body does the infection called pneumonia occur?”; for social science, “Where is the Panama Canal?”. Subjects were asked if they recognised names such as Linus Pauling, Isaac Newton and Bertrand Russell. In short, the tests as a group included the general knowledge we would like secondary school graduates to have. Subjects were also asked about their familiarity with current authors and magazines, using author identification (e.g. Stephen King, Maja Angelou) and title recognition tests (Forbes, Ladies Home Journal). These two measures combined made up a measure of “print exposure”.
Print exposure was by the far the best predictor of the combined tests of knowledge described above. Of great interest, high school grades was a much weaker predictor and did not reach statistical significance. Performance on tests of reading comprehension, mathematics and analytic thinking (Raven Matrices) reached statistical significance but were far weaker predictors than print exposure. Exposure to TV had no value as a predictor of general knowledge.
A plausible interpretation of these results: reading current popular authors and magazines results in more general knowledge than “study” (as reflected by grade point average).
What about homework? Increasing the amount of homework assigned to students is a common way of attempting to stimulate more learning, but it is not supported by research. Kohn (2007) concludes that "there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied." He also found that “no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.”
In his book The Homework Myth, Kohn also points out that the only homework some teachers give “is to ask children to read books of their own choosing"; a “satisfying policy...because sustained reading...helps children to become more proficient readers...[and] the research supporting that conclusion is as powerful as the research supporting homework is weak” (citing my aforementioned book).
Self-selected pleasure reading shows promise of being a very efficient and pleasant way to stimulate more subject matter learning and more literacy and language development. If so, full-functioning school libraries are far more valuable than we ever thought.