Reading and Spoken Volumes

From Generation M2; Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds from The Kaiser Foundation.

Interesting reading stats.

Particularly intriguing that there is such a sharp association with completed college education. James Heckman found that there was no material earnings difference between high school drop outs and those who later earned a GED. His conclusion was that the earnings barrier was not the knowledge acquisition represented by the dropout versus the GED earner. Rather, the association ran between income and behavior; not between income and knowledge. If you had the self-control to complete high school on time, that behavior of self-control would later also serve you well in work.

There is a similar such break in this data. If your parents are high school graduates or attended college and did not complete it, then you are likely to have the same level of book reading (22 and 21 minutes respectively). The big jump, a jump of 50% from 21 minutes to 31 minutes of reading is between those home environments in which parents completed college versus anything less. I am guessing that the causative flow is one of values and behaviors. Parents that had the self-discipline to complete college also likely value reading and have the self-discipline to create an environment in which reading is encouraged and rewarded.

Also interesting is the disparity between reading volumes between the races. 28 minutes a day spent reading books by whites, 18 minutes by African-Americans, and 20 minutes by Hispanics. So whites are reading about 50% more than blacks. Now certainly that is a function of history, economics, and culture. This parallels, though somewhat less dramatically, the findings of Hart & Ridley where the cumulative volume of direct verbal communication before kindergarten was about 15 million words for the lowest income participants (primarily African American), 30 million words for middle class, and 40 million for wealthy families.

Combining these two studies together suggests that perhaps a significant causation of variance in communication capability and scores is probably solely related to practice. If whites are reading 50% more books and hearing 100-200% more words, you have to expect that they would have higher reading and verbal scores (and the attendant correlations that go with communication fluency) simply as a matter of exposure and practice. The factual and experiential content that go with that volume can't be ignored either.

There is a third study, Summer Reading: Predicting Adolescent Word Learning from Aptitude, time spent reading, and text type by Joshua Fahey Lawrence, that bares consideration. In this study, Lawrence found that the nature of the text is relevant in terms of forecasted vocabulary scores. The most popular forms of summertime reading, from websites and e-mail had no predictive power regarding improved fall vocabulary scores. Reading comics, musical lyrics, and magazines had predictive power, but negatives. The more comics and magazines, the lower the vocabulary results in the fall. Reading fiction and non-fiction had predictive strength for fall vocabulary scores.

That doesn't sound so startling but there are advocates within academia who wish to redefine reading as encompassing all forms of reading and accord each type equal importance. What this study does is support the traditional view that it does matter what you read and that serious reading (literary fiction and non-fiction) is good for you and better than the alternative forms of reading.

All this suggests that if we want greater volumes of critical readers, we have to focus on the values and behaviors of the reading population and not simply the infrastructure of reading (more books, more libraries, etc.) The latter are necessary but, absent the values and behavior component, likely insufficient.

If you want your child better prepared for school and life, give them easy access to great books and discuss those books with them. All the other issues fall by the wayside in the face of those two critical activities.