Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the…

Objective: Reading is often cited as beneficial for one's mental health, but the research on this topic is limited. The goal of the present research was to examine whether recreational reading is beneficial for mental health during college, and to determine what motivates recreational reading. Participants: Participants were 231 university…

The Matthew effects suggest that children who struggle when learning to read are less likely to read for pleasure later in life compared to children who ease into reading quickly. One aspect of early literacy instruction that might hamper reading progress is learning to read simultaneously in two languages. Despite the long-lasting and widespread…

Understanding how social influences can foster avid book reader identification is a key research goal that warrants further investigation beyond a limited early-years lens. The author's 2015 International Study of Avid Book Readers (ISABR) explored, as one of its key research questions, the influence positive social agents can have on avid book…

In early 2017, Scholastic, in conjunction with YouGov, conducted a survey to explore the attitudes and behaviours of English- and French-speaking Canadian children and families around reading books for fun. The key findings of this research, based on a nationally representative sample of 1,939 parents and children, including 371 parents of…

Introduction: This study analyzed survey responses from 84 teachers of students with visual impairments who had provided literacy instruction to dual-media students who used both print and braille. Methods: These teachers in the United States and Canada completed an online survey during spring 2015. Results: The teachers reported that they…

What is the hold of literature on a reader's imagination, on my imagination? I remember many hours spent with books in a kind of romantic entanglement, and heartful obsession, and joyful reverie. I certainly remember being lost with words, lost in enthusiastic abandonment. I loved the sounds of words, and the images they conjured, and the…

Recreational reading as a method of language learning has been a focus of investigation in second language education. This article considers recreational reading through the additional perspective of academic librarianship. Its purpose is to discover if recreational reading is a topic that lends itself to research through both perspectives. This…

Beginning with the premise that pleasure is a driving force in life, this article examines the relationships between pleasure, schooling and society across the past century. Through the examination of school texts, narratives, and histories of literacy instruction, a case is made that part of the move away from keeping pleasure at the heart of…

Situated in a review of rural, cultural, and youth geographies, this article reports on a qualitative study of the role of reading and libraries in the lives of older rural teenagers. The primary method of data collection was the use of in-depth, flexibly structured interviews with twenty-seven youth between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years,…

This paper reports on a research study investigating the role of pleasure reading in the lives of 12-15 year old residents of an eastern Canadian regional municipality. Pleasure reading was found to fulfill three broad functions: it enhanced academic performance, social engagement and personal development. In conclusion, the study confirms that…

This is the 2011 edition of a biennial series of compendia describing key education outcomes and contexts of education in the Group of Eight (G-8) countries--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The report is organized into five topical areas: population and school enrollment,…

The primary purpose of this report is to explore within the Canadian context the relationship between Self-Reported Learning Disabilities (SRLD) and low literacy performance using the Canadian portion of the public data set from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (IALSS). Two primary research questions related to SRLD…

This exploratory survey was conducted to gain a detailed understanding of the home and community literacy experiences of children, adolescents and adults with Down syndrome. The data were collected from 224 parents/guardians across Canada who were asked to indicate literacy goals and priorities for their children with Down syndrome, the literacy…