Reading skills are considered an important lever for success in school and active participation in society. They are positively associated with reading motivation, reading self-concept, reading frequency, and behavioral engagement in reading (e.g., time, effort), variables that tend to decline as students move from elementary to secondary school.…

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…

The link between recreational book reading and improved literacy performance is consistently supported by educational research. Increasing engagement in recreational book reading remains imperative for English teachers, though how to best facilitate this in a secondary context is an object of contention, with limited research in this field. The…

The benefit of recreational book reading is well recognized, however the role of teachers in encouraging recreational reading beyond the primary school years of skill acquisition is not clearly defined. In 2012, the West Australian Study in Adolescent Book Reading was undertaken in 20 schools in Western Australia. As part of the study, students…

A large percentage of the students who drop out of K-12 schools in the United States do so at the end of high school, at some point after grade 10. Yet little is known about the differences between types of students who drop out near the end of high school. The purpose of this study is to examine a typology of high school dropouts from a large…

This study examines how competence beliefs and task values predict high school achievement choices related to literacy. Students' task beliefs (self-concept of ability, intrinsic value, and importance) about reading in the 4th grade and English in the 10th grade were tracked over time. Task beliefs, school performance, and gender were used to…