More Pleasure Reading Than We Suspected? – P.S. to Scholastic Report

More commentary on Scholastic’s Family Reading Report, released earlier this week, this time from Tim Shanahan, a widely recognized and published academic in the field of youth literacy and learning. Among his observations on the report are the following:

The major reason that they say they don’t read for pleasure is because they have other things to do, like working on computers. Some of that time might be spent on just dumb video games, but at least some of it is spent on other reading and writing activities (two-thirds of the kids said they have looked up authors and other book-related information on line).

The bad news in the report (and this is not new—I’ve found surveys all the way back to World War I with the same pattern) is that older students read less than younger students do. Preschoolers like books more than elementary kids do, and elementary kids like them more than teens. Similarly, boys were somewhat less taken with reading than were girls.

http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/

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