Recently in Academic Study Reading Category

From a thesis by Jill Jenkins at George mason University:

This study investigated how the context of a Primary 3 (P3) teacher of Luganda in Uganda influenced the teacher's literacy instructional decision-making, beliefs, pedagogy, and practices before and after she was provided with supplies and literacy instructional procedures that helped produce reading materials for her students. The contextual problems that were addressed were the poverty context that included the lack of opportunities for P3 students to read in their native language due to having few or no books in Luganda (a minor language), and instructional practices that focused on rote learning which put students in a passive learning environment. The study was conducted for eight months in a rural/urban, public primary school P3 classroom with over 100 students. There were few teacher and student resources and 18 different mother tongues represented in the classroom. For six weeks the teacher taught the researcher about her beliefs, pedagogy, and practices through interviews, observations, and writing. The researcher also conducted interviews with selected students and community members. The innovation was based on Ball's teacher change model and involved the researcher modeling Language Experience Approach book writing, sharing information on literacy pedagogy, and collaborating and supporting the teacher's reflection and decision-making to develop literacy activities. A model was developed that included small group book writing that took the local context into account. The teacher experimented with the model and changed it according to her desires. The results included an increase in teacher capacity; changes in her beliefs, pedagogy, and practices; and modifications in the context. Less advanced students received support from more advanced peers, and the teacher had more time to work with groups and individual students. In addition, at minimal cost, students authored books on the curriculum in a minor language and read them.

A perfect Masters thesis... from Judith Montgomery at Sierra Nevada College, "Effects Of The Accelerated Reader As A Motivational Tool In Promoting Literacy In The Classroom"

This single school, comparative study used a pretest-posttest control group design to examine the efficacy of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program on second grade students‟ motivation to read and their reading achievement. The relatively small sample of thirty-six participants attended an at-risk school, whose student population was deficient in meeting reading standards overall. These students had diverse needs and abilities. After twelve weeks it was determined that Accelerated Reader had no substantive impact on the treatment group‟s attitude toward reading or improvement of their reading abilities. It is suggested that AR may promote enthusiasm, fluency, and comprehension skills for those students who are independent readers but not for students reading below grade level.

Here's the link to the gated article.

Do individuals engage in beneficial activities, like recreational reading, if the necessary materials are easily accessible and relatively inexpensive? I investigate this issue by estimating how much reading time increases as a result of public library use. To address the endogeneity of library use I use an IV approach where the instrument is a household's distance to their closest public library. Using data from the Current Population Survey, American Time Use Survey, and National Household Education Survey, I find that library use increases the amount of time an individual spends reading by approximately 27 min on an average day. Moreover, it increases the amount of time parents spend reading to/with young children by 14 min. This increase in reading is more than offset by a 59 min decrease in time spent watching television, and there is no significant change in time spent on other activities. For children in school, library use positively impacts homework completion rates. A simple cost-benefit exercise highlights the potential application of these results for local governments who fund these libraries.

From author Mary Welk:

I didn't mind when a person said no, they enjoyed something other than mystery. It's fine with me if other people enjoy romance or sci-fi or non-fiction books. What bothered me was the number of people who waved me off with "I don't read" or "I'm don't have time for books" or "I did enough reading in school". It wasn't just the words that aggravated me. It was the pride I heard in these people's voices as they rejected the very notion of reading. These were BUSY people with BUSY lives and BETTER THINGS TO DO than WASTE TIME reading. Reading was dismissed as something fit only for school children and old people in rocking chairs. I gritted my teeth and smiled the first few times these words were spoken. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut when one woman pointed to her daughter and two grandchildren and said, "She has two kids. She has no time for books." "Really?" I replied nastily. "I raised six kids and still found time to read." What I didn't add was, maybe that's why all my kids have done well in life. They've learned that reading is not only enjoyable, but also makes them better educated and more informed citizens of this country. I wonder how those two children will turn out with a mother who has no time for books.

Or maybe not?  I read an enormous amount as a child, but my mother recently reminded me that in other regards I was a pretty normal 10 year old... 

This feelgood story feels good to me... access to books seems to have a big effect on children's reading, even in the U.S. where books are ubiquitous.

Can a $50 stack of paperback books do as much for a child's academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school? An experimental program in seven states may help answer that question this summer as districts from Nevada to South Carolina give thousands of low-income students an armful of free books. Research has shown that simply giving children books may be as effective as summer school -- and a lot cheaper. The big question is whether the effect can be replicated on a larger scale and help reduce the USA's nagging achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students.

Someone just the other day asked me about whether young people using the libraries were "brokering" the books with the largely non-literate parents... I said it was a great issue, and one that would require an anthropologist spending some serious time in the villages... well, at least now I know who would be a great person to do that if she could undertake a "no-expenses paid" research project... The paper abstracted below is gated, but a related paper is ungated and available here.

This ethnographic study examined literacy brokering among Sudanese refugee families in Michigan. Literacy brokering occurs as individuals seek informal help with unfamiliar texts and literacy practices. Data collection involved participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and collection of artifacts over 18 months. Researcher analysis of data identified patterns through coding and theme analysis, using the literacy brokering event as the unit of analysis. Three southern Sudanese refugee families participated in the study, including four focal children (two boys and two girls) in kindergarten and first grade. Challenging current notions of brokering, results show that brokering was not merely a matter of translation and that issues of genre also were important. Most brokering events provided knowledge about the purposes for, uses of, and textual features of specific written genres. Together, these types of brokering contributed to Sudanese participants' understandings of texts, genres, and, most importantly, literacy practices in their new U.S. context. Many people acted as brokers for the refugees, including their own young children, who were just emerging into English literacy themselves. Literacy brokering allowed these children to help their parents as they simultaneously gained important literacy knowledge and skills themselves. These results add to existing knowledge about the construct of literacy brokering as well, the nature of literacy practices, and issues of family literacy.

Abstract from Perry, K.H. (2009, July/August/September). Genres, Contexts, and Literacy Practices: Literacy Brokering Among Sudanese Refugee Families. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 256-276. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.44.3.2

So it is quite common that people asking me about "Why libraries?" are really asking me to tell them a story about how someone read a book and it made them a better person.  Of course, they are happy with an anecdote, but the social scientist in me hesitates to generalize from anecdotes, and I know that many many kids do not become better persons no matter how many Narnia books they read (or the non-existent as far as I know African equivalent, but I am waiting for Akpan to get some hope and have some fun and write a fantasy novel for kids and grownups set in Africa... The Famished Road, you suggest... are you kidding?).  Anyway, the social scientist in me hesitates to ascribe much definitive good to book reading, and now I hesitate even more, because much recent science is saying we may as well just open oxytocin bars instead of libraries... Of course, continuing my thought, what if they took the oxytocin double-shot and then read a really bad book? 

 Deric Bownds' MindBlog reproduces an abstract from  from Hurlemann et al.:

Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders. However, the potential of OT as a general facilitator of human learning and empathy is unclear. The current double-blind experiments on healthy adult male volunteers investigated first whether treatment with intranasal OT enhanced learning performance on a feedback-guided item-category association task where either social (smiling and angry faces) or nonsocial (green and red lights) reinforcers were used, and second whether it increased either cognitive or emotional empathy measured by the Multifaceted Empathy Test. Further experiments investigated whether OT-sensitive behavioral components required a normal functional amygdala. Results in control groups showed that learning performance was improved when social rather than nonsocial reinforcement was used. Intranasal OT potentiated this social reinforcement advantage and greatly increased emotional, but not cognitive, empathy in response to both positive and negative valence stimuli. Interestingly, after OT treatment, emotional empathy responses in men were raised to levels similar to those found in untreated women. Two patients with selective bilateral damage to the amygdala (monozygotic twins with congenital Urbach-Wiethe disease) were impaired on both OT-sensitive aspects of these learning and empathy tasks, but performed normally on nonsocially reinforced learning and cognitive empathy. Overall these findings provide the first demonstration that OT can facilitate amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in men.

In my class on the economics of gender in developing countries we were discussing a recently published paper by Nancy Qian that estimates the effects on the sex ratio (how many boys there are compared with girls) of increases in the relative incomes of women.  Not surprisingly, in 1980s China the effect is negative and pretty large.  The interesting thing about the paper is the method.  Normally a correlation between higher female income and lower sex ratio would be viewed skeptically: maybe some other factors are responsible for both lower sex ratios and higher incomes.  Qian is able to use the market liberalization in China's agriculture, in 1979, to do what is known as a difference-in-difference analysis.  That is, she can estimate the effects of the higher incomes after liberalization in tea growing areas by comparing the changes there to the changes that happened in non-tea growing areas.  Tea growing areas favor female labor, natch, so higher price of tea after liberalization meant higher demand for female labor and that then meant more girls survived (sex ratio fell). 

After class, I was trying to think if there was any analogy to apply the method to library impact studies.  Hard to do anything like this in the places where FAVL operates... there are simply not enough libraries to properly study their impact, nor are there any non-library measures of reading habits and availability.  But in developed countries with lots of libraries, it occurred to me that the move of library systems to enable bar-coded self checkout and online renewals meant a huge reduction in the cost of using libraries.  I know that in my own personal behavior, I have not waited in a line to check out books since, well, since 1995 I suppose... just before San Jose library system switched to self-checkout.  Suddenly there were no more lines, ever.  Amazing!  So since different library systems probably switched at different times due to budgetary reasons, the changes in their trends of borrowers from before and after their switch to self-checkout will be largely exogenous to user reading habits.  If so, then those changes can be used to estimate the effect of reading more through libraries on school test scores.  Someday, maybe someone will pursue this line of reasoning.  Maybe someone already has!

Abstract of Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye's article "Tenir un cahier dans la région cotonnière du Mali"

Cet article repose sur une ethnographie des pratiques de l'écrit menée dans un village de la zone cotonnière du Mali. Dans cette région, l'alphabétisation, très inégale, est diverse dans ses formes et dans les langues utilisées à l'écrit (bambara, français, arabe). L'article porte sur une pratique commune qui consiste à recueillir sur un cahier un ensemble de notations personnelles. Son propos est d'éclairer la signification anthropologique de cette pratique par l'examen attentif du support d'écriture. Le cahier est à la fois un objet à soi, le lieu d'une appropriation de modèles scripturaux, et un espace graphique dont les scripteurs se saisissent de manières diverses, d'une mise en ordre de différentes figures de soi à des formes moins organisées de recueil. Ces différentes dimensions en font un lieu d'expérimentation de nouveaux rapports à soi.

This paper is based on an ethnographic research on literacy practices in a village located in the cotton- growing region of Mali. The area is partially literate, with Bambara, French, and Arabic used as written languages. The paper focuses on notebook-writing, a common practice meant to keep personal records. It investigates the anthropological meanings of this practice, by paying specific attention to its materiality. The notebook, as an object, is a personal belonging. It also represents the site where the writer takes hold of written models for his own purposes. As a "graphic space", it is handled in different ways: some writers cautiously reorganise the outlines of their self by following a specific order in writing, whereas others use it to mere collection. Through these different dimensions, notebook- writing offers a space to explore new forms of subjectivity.