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As many of you know, U.S. student reading scores are at historic lows, and the number of students who read for pleasure is down fifty percent from twenty years ago. Not just kids, but adults, too—in the recent article from The Atlantic, “The End of Reading,” journalist Rose Horowitch says more adults gambled this year than read a book. What’s becoming clear is that Americans are reading less and less—and outside of school, students are reading less, too.
But what about inside of school? The new wave of science-of-reading reforms took aim at this growing literacy crisis by putting policies in place to ensure more students know how to read words—an important first step to reading, period.
Yet in my reporting over the last couple of months, I’ve heard from teachers, researchers and experts about something that’s come up again and again: students are doing little reading inside of school, too.
There are a host of reasons for this, which I’ll get into in the coming weeks. But first, I want to gather some data, and need your help.
When I was in upper elementary and middle school, I remember a not insignificant amount of time was spent reading content textbooks together as a class. In history or science, I remember having to follow along for a few pages of a chapter that students took turn reading. In addition, when students finished their work early, we were allowed to pull out a book or choose one from the class library, which I always took advantage of. In high school Spanish, I remember reading from the textbook often, out loud together, chorally.
Understanding the limits of my hindsight memory (let’s face it, it’s been a while), I remember there being a lot of reading during the school day, and I’m wondering whether this is still the case today. What I see a lot in my own kids is that chapter textbook reading has often been replaced with slide presentations. Textbooks are limited, or don’t exist.
I’m looking for k-12 teachers and leaders to help answer a few questions for me to help clarify this—how much time are your students spending actually reading? This can be reading together with the teacher, independent reading, reading from chapter books or textbooks or articles.
Here’s what I’m looking for: share your state, what grade and subject you teach, and average daily or weekly amount of time in minutes students are spending reading either stories or content. If you’ve got access to daily averages—adding up reading across subjects in the school day—I’d be interested in that as well.
If you’re assigning reading homework, I want to hear about that, too.
You can leave a comment here in the Open Thread, or shoot me an email at holly@hollykorbey.com. I’ll be compiling the answers for a future story on reading time.
Let ‘er rip:
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