May 2008 — News
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Study Reveals What Kids Are Reading for School
Extra Credit
Students in the top 10 percent of reading achievement (based on STAR Reading assessment scores) tended to emphasize more science fiction and fantasy than general readers. Top-20 books that the highest achievers in grades 9 through 12 read that did not crack the general top 20 included:
More Information --D. Nagel |
According to the first study of its kind released in the United States, kids are reading an average of about 26 books per school year. That's the great news. The less than great news is that their volume of reading peaks in second grade, and the level and volume of books that they're reading stagnates from about sixth grade onward, even dropping off in high school.
The findings are part of a report released this week by Renaissance Learning, based on results from more than 3 million students in more than 9,800 schools around the country. The data do not come from a survey; they were recorded in 2007 directly within Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader software, which captures the titles of the books read, quiz scores, number of words read, and book readability levels for more than 115,000 titles. The report, What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools, presents these results, including not only the volume of books read by students at each grade level (1 through 12) by sex and geographic region, but also which books made the top 20 at each grade level.
What it found was that the largest number of books read was in first, second, and grade--at an average of 38.6, 46.2, and 40.2 books per child per year, respectively. (In first grade, 70 percent of those books were read independently by the student; in second grade, 84 percent were read independently. The remainder were read to the students or read with them.)
By fourth grade, the average number of books read per student for the year dropped to 29.2, followed by 19.1 in fifth grade, 12.9 in sixth, 10.7 in seventh, 7.1 in eighth, 6.5 in ninth, 6.3 in 10th, 5.8 in 11th, and 4.5 in 12th.
