Current Research (2000-present)

Illiteracy and Poverty, Education and Crime are Critically Interconnected

Motivation and Enjoyment – Including feeling like a member of a community of readers, having the opportunity to choose what you read, and having a rich selection of reading material in the home – are critical to enjoyment and success in reading and education.

Reading More Means Reading Better; those who do not read much cannot get better at it.

Reading More Means Learning a Second Language Quicker and More Fluently

Reading more means more knowledge in other areas - including math and science - and increased civic and cultural participation

Illiteracy and Poverty, Education and Crime are Critically Interconnected

1. “Low reading scores are one of the most reliable predictors of whether a student will drop out of high school.”  Alliance for Excellent Education. (2006). The Crisis in America’s High Schools, www.all4ed.org/whats_at_stake/crisis.html.

2. 75% of America’s state prison inmates are high school dropouts [Harlow, C. W. 2003, January. Education and correctional populations. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.]

3. High school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested in their lifetime. [Alliance for Excellent Education. (2003a, November). FactSheet: The impact of education on: Crime. Washington, DC: Author.]

5. If half the students who drop out of school were to stay in school and graduate in four years, the state [New Mexico] economy would see: a gain of approximately $944 billion in tax revenue, and decreases in cost to public welfare and crime of $24 billion over the course of the graduates’ lifetimes. (Based on costs adjusted for inflation from an earlier study). [Thorstensen, B. I. If you build it, they will come: Investing in public education (PowerPoint Presentation). New Mexico Business Roundtable for Educational Excellence.  Retrieved April 14, 2008. Available: http://abec.unm.edu/resources/gallery/present/ invest_in_ed.pdf]

6. If the United States’ likely dropouts from the Class of 2006 had graduated, the nation could have saved more than $17 billion in Medicaid and expenditures for uninsured health care over the course of those young people’s lifetimes. [Alliance for Excellent Education 2006b]

7. The following citation is an older one (1999), but we include it here for its more detailed breakdown of individual savings incurred by each individual who graduates.  We feel this is a valid citation to share, as more current data on dropout rates and social costs remain consistent, and expenses can safely be assumed to follow. 

For each person who is moved from the status of high school dropout to graduate, these annual savings occur by age 30:
                Social programs (jail, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.): $4,121
                Increase in graduate’s tax payment: $1,617
                Increase in disposable income: $2,449
[Georges Vernez, Richard Krop, and C. Peter Ryde, “Closing the Education Gap: Benefits and Costs,”  RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1999), p. 143]

8. A one-year increase in average education levels would reduce arrest rates by 11%, and a 1% increase in high school graduation rates would save approximately $1.4 billion in incarceration costs, or about $2,100 per each male high school graduate. [Alliance for Excellent Education. (2003a, November). FactSheet: The impact of education on: Crime. Washington, DC: Author.]

Motivation and Enjoyment – Including feeling like a member of a community of readers, having the opportunity to choose what you read, and having a rich selection of reading material in the home – are critical to enjoyment and success in reading and education.
 

1. “Motivation for learning is thought to be one of the most critical determinants of the success and quality of any learning outcome (Mitchell, 1992), and it is therefore likely “that motivational processes are the foundation for coordinating cognitive goals and strategies in reading” (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000, p. 408) [National Literacy Review. Clark, Christina & Rumbold, Kate.  Reading for Pleasure: A Research Overview.  November 2006]

1.  “Students who find reading as a form of recreation see themselves as members of a community of readers who interact socially around books and share a love of reading with [others.]” [Strommen, L., & Mates, B. (2004, November).  Learning to Love Reading: Interviews with Older Children and Teens.  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(3), 188-200.  Doi: 10.1598/JAAL.48.3.1]
   

3. “It is only by wading into [the] stream of print that [children] will discover the subject that will pull them deeper into print.”

[Jim Trelease, The Read Aloud Handbook, Penguin Books 2001, p. 115]

4. Fostering interest in voluntary reading requires that children have some autonomy in choosing the texts to be read as well as access to a substantial quantity of books that vary on several dimensions including difficulty, genre, topic, and length…[these are] all important features of efforts to promote greater voluntary reading, especially among lower-achieving students.[it. mine] [Allington, A.  and Allington, R.; Lost Summers: Few Books and Few Opportunities to Read, Reading Rockets, 2004]

5. As a child advances in elementary school, it becomes increasingly imperative to allow her the opportunity to choose her own books if the goal is continued engagement in reading in and outside of the classroom.  In kindergarten, a margin of 7% of children reported they read books they had chosen more than books chosen for them; by sixth grade, that margin had grown to 68%. [Schatz, Adrienne; Assessments from the 2004/2005 program; Book Trust Fort Collins] 

6. The most successful way to improve the reading achievement of low-income children is to increase their access to print.

[Newman, Sanford, et all. "American's Child Care Crisis: A Crime Prevention Tragedy"; Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, 2000.]

Reading More Means Reading Better; those who do not read much cannot get better at it.

1. Free Voluntary Reading allows a person to read long enough and far enough so the act of reading becomes automatic.  If one must stop to concentrate on each word, then fluency is lost along with meaning.  It is also fatiguing.  Being able to do it automatically is the goal. [Stephen Krashen, The Power of Reading (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 2004)]

2. In a six-week study of self-selected reading among 200 sixth graders attending summer school because of low reading proficiency; 30% were limited English proficient; comparison children followed a standard language arts curriculum: The readers gained approximately five months on the Altos test of reading comprehension and vocabulary over the six-week period, while comparisons declined.  On the Nelson-Denny reading comprehension test, the readers grew well over one year.  On the vocabulary section, however, the groups showed equivalent gains.  [Shin, F., Motivating students with Goosebumps and other popular books, CSLA Journal (California School Library Association;) 2001, issue 25(1), pp. 15-19]

3. Paul T. Wilson writes in "Reading Education Report" that reading time emerges consistently as the best predictor of fifth-grade comprehension, vocabulary size, reading speed, and gains in comprehension between the second and the fifth grades: "If the goal of a more literate America is to be achieved, children must be given opportunities to read, motivation to read, and access to books."

4. Research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2002) showed that reading enjoyment is more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status. Reading for pleasure could therefore be one important way to help combat social exclusion and raise educational standards. [National Literacy Review. Clark, Christina & Rumbold, Kate.  Reading for Pleasure: A Research Overview.  November 2006]

Reading More Means Learning a Second Language Quicker and More Fluently

1. Two groups of adult ESL students were tested on unknown words contained in Animal Farm.  One group memorized the list by rote; the second read the book.  The readers were not aware they would be tested on the vocabulary.  When tested after one week, those who memorized the list did better, but after three weeks there was no difference between the groups.  Those who did rote memorization forgot words between the two tests, but the readers actually improved their scores.

[Hermann, F.; Differential effects of reading and memorization of paired associates on vocabulary acquisition in adult learners of English as a second language, TESL-EJ, Issue 7(1), Pages A-1, 2003]

Reading more means more knowledge in other areas – including math and science – and increased civic and cultural participation

1. Skills necessary for developing informational literacy - research, evaluation of sources, technology, etc. - can only stem from reading and critical thinking.

[Association of College and Research Libraries; Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, 2005.;

2. Please see attached research overview for additional data on the relationship between science and reading

3. Literary readers are well over three times as likely as non-readers to visit art museums and attend plays or musicals or classical or jazz concerts. Although not shown here, they are evenmore likely than non-readers to go out to the movies and listen to classical or jazz radio stations. Further, literary readers are significantly more likely than non-readers to play sports or attend amateur or professional sporting events.sey do outdoor activities (e.g., camping, hiking, and canoeing), exercise at home or in a gym, and create art through photographs, paintings, or writings—all at higher rates than Americans who do not read fiction, drama, or poetry. [The National Endowment of the Arts. November 2007. To Read or Not to Read: A question of National Consequence. Retrieved from http://www.arts.gov/research/ToRead.pdf April, 2008]

6. Proficient readers…exhibit greater curiosity about current events, public affairs, and government activity, as measured by their use of media to obtain this information. In the absence of hard data explaining the reason for increased civic engagement among literary and skilled readers, we might consider the question more abstractly.  The NEA’s 2006 Arts and Civic Engagement research brochure noted: “By every measure captured by the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, literary readers lead more robust lifestyles than non-readers.  These findings contradict commonly held assumptions that readers and arts participants are passive, isolated, or self-absorbed.”  Another quotation, this one from the novelist, literary critic, and popular theologian C.S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia), presents a personal reason for expecting readers to identify more closely with community than non-readers:

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege….But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself….Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”  [C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 140–141.]

Good readers, and not only literary ones, enjoy this privilege of understanding and appreciating the outlook of others while enlarging their own identity. Perhaps because of this active empathy, they contribute inmeasurable ways to civic and social improvements.  Ultimately, reading skills and early habits of leisure reading may come to occupy the same relationship to artistic, cultural, and civic progress as “basic science” skills.  [The National Endowment of the Arts. November 2007. To Read or Not to Read: A question of National Consequence. Retrieved from http://www.arts.gov/research/ToRead.pdf April, 2008]