Hmmm

Well this is just very interesting as I have never seen it alluded to anywhere else. I am in the midst of doing some research trying to pin down what exactly are the activities that parents can undertake in the home that are likely to increase the odds of their children becoming enthusiastic readers. As part of that effort you of course need to define what constitutes enthusiastic reading. I am turning up a lot of very interesting material that I hope will be useful.

One of the issues that arises is the perception that we have a crisis of "boy reading" or more accurately boy non-reading. I'll go into that issue later as there are many unstated assumptions that color the answer as to whether there really is a crisis or not. Regardless of the nuances, there is a measurable reality that in middle school and high school, boys are less likely to read at all and do read less than girls in terms of hours spent reading.

I have just been working with some of the data that is annually collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program and the Higher Education Research Institute of UCLA. They administer an annual survey to matriculating freshmen and graduating seniors regarding their college expectations and experiences. It is a very interesting body of data as these surveys have been administered to student populations in the tens of thousands across hundreds of institutions of higher learning and for more than forty years. So there is a lot of data that is pretty robust and with good consistency over time.

The nugget which I have come across is the comparative habits of reading for students at the time they enter college and the time that they leave. In 2008, some 23,423 graduating students had also taken the survey when they matriculated, allowing you to look at changes in habits during their college career.

One questions asks "During the past year, how much time did you spend during the typical week doing the following activities?"

Reading for pleasure
None
Less than an hour
1 to 2 hours
3 to 5 hours
6 to 10 hours
11 to 15 hours
16 to 20 hours
Over 20 hours

Analyzing the numbers, one can see that on entering university, fewer women than men read nothing at all for pleasure (14.5% versus 24.7%) and that women read more at each of the levels above None than do men. In aggregate, at the time of entering university, more women than men are reading at all and they read about 25% more in volume than do men.

Not unexpectedly, the volume of reading for pleasure declines during their college years. However, whereas the volume of reading for pleasure declines by about 25% for men, it declines by more than half for women. What is especially interesting is the decline by level of reading intensity. (Infrequent readers being non-readers and those reading less than an hour a week; intermittent readers reading between one and five hours a week; and enthusiastic readers reading between six and more than 20 hours a week for pleasure).

Infrequent male readers go from 52% to 59% but infrequent female readership goes from 41% to 64%. Intermittent male reading goes from 39.4% to 36% whereas intermittent female readers go from 47% to 33%. The Enthusiastic Reader population for males goes from 9.1% to 5.2% whereas enthusiastic female readers plummets from 12.2% to 3.6%.

The net is that in contrast to primary and secondary school where girls outread boys by healthy margins, by the time they graduate from college, (while everyone is reading less), men are doing more reading for pleasure at every level and among the most enthusiastic readers, men are spending more than 50% more time reading than women.

So all that is just data. What is the useful information? I am not sure. One might speculate that it is simply an artifact of males maturing at a slower rate than females. Possibly it is a function of being in a more male instructional environment, possibly it is greater freedom of reading choice. Other factors might also be at work. I just don't know but it does call into question the crisis of boy reading.