Research on the gendered reading habits and preferences of boys and girls presents them as very different. This study focuses on the gendered reading habits and preferences of Singapore adolescent students (aged 12 to 17) to examine if such polarity exists in their reading habits. Drawing on survey data from 4830 adolescents in five secondary…

This study examines associations between leisure reading and reading skills in data of 2,525 students followed from age 7 to 16. As a step further from traditional cross-lagged analysis, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to identify within-person associations of leisure reading (books, magazines, newspapers, and digital…

Following a Herculean effort by staff members at the author's school, students were reading more than ever and the reading culture was well on the way to changing for the better. While the author was excited beyond belief by this development, she was frustrated by the fact that students consistently reverted to summarizing when they were asked to…

This study examined primary school students' reading motivation and performance on the standardized exam. Participants included 901 seventh and eighth grade students from Kenya. There were 468 females and 433 males. Contrary to previous studies, results showed reading challenge and aesthetics, but not efficacy, predicted reading achievement,…

Teachers, parents, and librarians are constantly looking for methods and materials that engage students as readers and motivate them to increase the time they spend reading. In this article we describe findings from a study of middle schoolers' magazine reading habits that gave us a close look at the power of magazines as supplemental supports for…

Throughout the history of education, it has been noted that teachers are influential people in lives of children (Applegate & Applegate, 2004; Daisey, 2010; Gambrell, 1996; Ruddell, 1995). Children spend one-third (or more) of the day with teachers; and as they enter into adolescence, children come in contact with more and more teachers during…

In the spring of 2005, the author created a short, online questionnaire to capture data about middle schoolers and book covers, and after several pilot studies she posted it to SurveyMonkey.com. The study includes the fiction books for middle school from the 2005 Quick Picks list. Over the course of a week, participants reported to the school…

In this article, Elizabeth Birr Moje, Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris challenge some of the prevailing myths about adolescents and their choices related to reading. The reading practices of youth from one urban community are examined using mixed methods in an effort to define what, how often, and why adolescents choose to read. By…

The purpose of this study was to explore whether or not adolescents who are deemed underachievers and who struggle to read school-assigned textbooks will engage with popular culture texts of their own choosing (e.g., magazines, comics, TV, video games, music CDs, graffiti, e-mail, and other Internet-mediated texts). The 60 student participants,…