Over the past seven years, we have offered a psychology book club to undergraduate and graduate students in our department. We suggest the book club provides an informal opportunity for student-to-student and student-to-faculty interaction, and offers a way to engage students in critical thinking about popular psychological issues. In this…

For this study of specific values that adult readers derive from their reading, 100 people from eastern central Illinois were interviewed about their reading experiences. All persons selected for interview were identified as having a continuing interest in reading, reflected in regular voluntary reading. The interviews were analyzed for…

This report describes a program for increasing levels of leisure time reading and heightened awareness of age and ability appropriate literature with an effort to encourage targeted students in grades 2, 3, and 6 to become lifelong readers. The targeted population lives in a growing rural, low to upper middle class community located in north…

This report examines arts engagement in ten key states in the U.S. by analyzing data from the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). It is organized into ten state profiles that summarize key demographic characteristics, the arts landscape, and public participation in the arts. Because the regions profiled here are not a random…

This paper describes a program intended to motivate elementary students to read for recreational purposes. The targeted population consists of first-, second-, and third-grade students in a growing middle class community located in the south suburban area of Chicago, Illinois. The problem of students' attitudes toward recreational reading was…