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Parent Reading Research

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A large-scale Chilean study looked at the relationship between parents’ reading habits and those of their children. Unsurprisingly, the study revealed that, when it comes to adolescents’ leisure reading, the impact of parents’ reading motivation and frequency proved far more significant than socioeconomic status. Writes the author, “The findings reported here should encourage stakeholders to promote the love of reading in not only children but also their parents.

Cubillos, M. (2023). A chip off the old block: Do reading-motivated parents raise reading-motivated children?  Reading Research Quarterly.

https://repositorio.udd.cl/server/api/core/bitstreams/e6b7087f-a56f-44e4-b809-80fba9df1e79/content

ALMA 2023 Laureate

Congratulations to the 2023 laureate, Laurie Halse Anderson!

Laurie Halse Anderson is one of America’s foremost writers for young adults. Her breakthrough novel, Speak, was published in 1999 and has been translated into many languages and adapted for film. In her richly expressive novels for young people she gives voice to the adolescent experience with sometimes brutal honesty. The yearning for love and belonging is a recurring theme for Anderson.

The jury’s motivation:

“In her tightly written novels for young adults, Laurie Halse Anderson gives voice to the search for meaning, identity, and truth, both in the present and the past. Her darkly radiant realism reveals the vital role of time and memory in young people’s lives. Pain and anxiety, yearning and love, class and sex are investigated with stylistic precision and dispassionate wit. With tender intensity, Laurie Halse Anderson evokes, moods, and emotions and never shies from even the hardest things.”

ACRL Critical Reading Book

ACRL announces the publication of Teaching Critical Reading Skills: Strategies for Academic Librarians, edited by Hannah Gascho Rempel and Rachel Hamelers. This two-volume set — Reading in the Disciplines and for Specific Populations and Reading for Evaluation, Beyond Scholarly Texts, and in the World — provides ready-made activities you can add or adapt to your teaching practice.

 

This collection explores the experiences, approaches, and roles of librarians who teach reading: using pedagogical theories and techniques in new and interesting ways, making implicit reading knowledge, skills, and techniques explicit to students, presenting reading as a communal activity, partnering with other campus stakeholders, and leading campus conversations about critical reading. The five sections are arranged by theme:

 

Volume 1

● Part I: Reading in the Disciplines

● Part II: Reading for Specific Populations

 

Volume 2

● Part III: Reading Beyond Scholarly Texts

● Part IV: Reading to Evaluate

● Part V: Reading in the World

 

Each of the 45 chapters contains teaching and programmatic strategies, resources, and lesson plans, as well as a section titled “Critical Reading Connection” that highlights each author’s approach for engaging with the purpose of reading critically and advancing the conversation about how librarians can foster this skill.

 

Academic librarians and archivists have a long history of engaging with different types of literacy and acting as a bridge between faculty and students. We understand the different reading needs of specific student populations and the affective challenges with reading that are often shared across learner audiences. We know what types of sources are read, the histories—and needed changes—of how authority has been granted in various fields, how students may be expected to apply what they read in future professional or civic settings, and frequently look beyond our local institutions to think about the larger structural and social justice implications of what is read, how we read, and who does the reading.

 

These volumes can help you make the implicit explicit for learners and teach that reading is both a skill that must be practiced and nurtured and a communal act. Teaching Critical Reading Skills demonstrates librarians’ and archivists’ deep connections to our campus communities and how critical reading instruction can be integrated in a variety of contexts within those communities.

 

Teaching Critical Reading Skills: Strategies for Academic Librarians is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store, individually or as a set; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the U.S. or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Reading Research

Digital Practices for Reading Study

 Researchers “used an academic resilience framework to explore how adolescents from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds overcame adversity and achieved high levels of reading proficiency. Our main aim was to investigate whether digital reading practices and reading engagement (reading motivation and metacognitive strategies) could act as protective factors, individually and collectively, promoting academic resilience among students with low SES. Digital reading was related to reading motivation, and then to better awareness of metacognitive strategies, which in turn was shown to be linked to increased reading achievement for all students.

Jang, E., Seo, Y., & Brutt-Griffler, J. (2022). Building Academic Resilience in Literacy: Digital Reading Practices and Motivational and Cognitive Engagement. Reading Research Quarterly.

https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.486 

Reading Intervention Programs Literature Review

 Noticing that most scholarly efforts to examine the efficacy of reading intervention (RI) programs reviewed quantitative analyses of changes in reading tests, investigators reviewed 20 years of research, specifically examining two key facets of RI: placement and curriculum. What they discovered was a perpetuating cycle of instruction that keeps students trapped in intervention programs.

Learned, J., Frankel, K, & Brooks, M. (2022). Disrupting Secondary Reading Intervention: A Review of Qualitative Research and a Call to Action. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(6), 507-517. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jaal.1234

Secondary School Reading Study in England

A recent study of reading achievement of students in England’s secondary schools revealed several factors that predicted reading gains: leadership of reading such as a deputy head of literacy lead, regular assessment to accurately determine students’ reading needs, training staff on emerging reading strategies, highly skilled librarians to select and promote appropriate books, adequate funding to support reader needs, and staff awareness of students’ reading levels and needs.

‘Now the whole school is reading’: Supporting struggling readers in secondary schools. (2022, Oct.). Ofstead.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/now-the-whole-school-is-reading-supporting-struggling-readers-in-secondary-school/now-the-whole-school-is-reading-supporting-struggling-readers-in-secondary-school#monitoring-the-impact-of-additional-teaching-and-knowing-what-works

Print books preference study

An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study across approximately 30 countries found that teens who said they most often read paper books scored considerably higher on a 2018 reading test taken by 15-year-olds compared to teens who said they rarely or never read books. Even among students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those who read books in a paper format scored a whopping 49 points higher on the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA. That’s equal to almost 2.5 years of learning. By comparison, students who tended to read books more often on digital devices scored only 15 points higher than students who rarely read  – a difference of less than a year’s worth of learning.

Ikeda, M. and G. Rech (2022), “Does the digital world open up an increasing divide in access to print books?”, PISA in Focus, No. 118, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/54f9d8f7-en.