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When Inside Higher Education recently interviewed college students about their reading, a University of Florida sophomore claimed she relied entirely on YouTube videos to explain her reading. Academic texts, biology major Ava Wherley reported, used “overly complex language, which makes them harder to read.” Ironically, Wherley likely spends hours trying to glean information she could get from an hour of reading.
But Wherley is not, as she believes, a visual learner. Instead, she’s a struggling reader, likely with a fluency at a middle-school reading level because she’s also an avoidant reader. And the more she avoids reading, the harder she’ll find reading. In other words, Wherley perfectly illustrates the Matthew Effect, caught in a vicious cycle that dooms her success in college, the workplace, and life, including her ability to understand a complex argument or make an informed legal decision.
Less Reading Produces Less Reading Fluency
In this respect, Wherley has plenty of company. Untold millions of students rely on SparkNotes, videos, or AI for their reading, largely because they struggle with reading comprehension beyond a basic level.
Moreover, students struggle with reading because teachers have reduced the amount and complexity of students’ reading in primary and secondary grades. As The Washington Post recently reported, most teachers in secondary education have shifted to assigning short reading passages, ditching books entirely. And, in the few classes where students read books, they received summaries, which “just ruins the whole story for you,” as one middle school student protested. “Like, what’s the point of actually reading?”
However, when kids read entire novels without notes or summaries, they discover the pleasures of immersive reading. And immersive reading gives even avoidant readers the enhanced vocabulary they need to become better readers. Moreover, when students read frequently, they also improve their comprehension.
Reading for Pleasure Predicts Academic Success
In fact, reading frequency accounts for 13 percent of the variation between strong and weak readers in elementary grades, a difference that climbs to 30 percent in high school and 34 percent in college students. Moreover, as this same study revealed, even poor readers benefit from leisure time reading.
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However, students who read entire books in their leisure time enjoy the most significant benefits to their reading comprehension. Moreover, readers at all levels read more when books were both engaging and somewhat challenging—a far cry from the abridged books with outlines now frequently assigned even to students in secondary grades.
When kids read more frequently, they show significant activation in the area of the brain central to reading comprehension—the ventral occipital-temporal cortex. This increased activation leads to reading seeming automatic, rather than effortful, and also correlates strongly with reading speed. In addition, reading fluency predicts students’ grades and test scores across primary and secondary grades.
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Improving Students’ Leisure Reading
Despite these significant benefits, only 14 percent of U.S. students report reading in their leisure time, the lowest percentage in the English-speaking world. In addition, children report less time for reading due to parents loading their schedules with organized activities. And unsurprisingly, students’ screen time further negatively impacts reading comprehension.
Parents can improve kids’ reading comprehension by limiting their screen time and sharing books with them. As multiple studies have documented, screen time for children younger than two years had negative long-term effects on their reading comprehension. In contrast, as studies of over 7,000 students reveal, when parents share books with children, they boost students’ comprehension and verbal fluency. These benefits extended to gains in technical reading, even when parents had read only fiction with their children.
Education Essential Reads
Children of parents who encourage reading perform better at reading comprehension and, equally significant, at understanding social experiences and creating mental constructions of others’ behavior. This understanding provides adolescents with the insight they need to assess and react to their peers’ behavior, a valuable step in helping teenagers regulate their reactions to social media.
Source link : https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/how-writing-works/202410/how-parents-impact-their-kids-reading-skills
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Publish date : 2024-10-02 15:47:57
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