Despite the value of reading, research documents declining reading rates among American adolescents - a decline that exacerbates student dropout rates and academic performance. As a high school English teacher in a public, regional, suburban school, increasing the number of students who deeply read the assigned texts for class has been a…

The literature reveals that no adequate instrument exists to measure college students' attitudes toward academic reading even though such attitudes are crucial for reading compliance and learning from text. To remedy this, the authors created and refined an attitude survey, administering it to 855 university students across four iterations. The…

This article reports findings from two studies assessing reading compliance among first semester freshmen at a small Midwestern two-year liberal arts university. The first study assessed reading compliance of students enrolled in two sections of First Year Seminar, finding that 46% of students reported that they read assignments, yet only 55% of…

A study tested the hypothesis that students who were required to read a book of their choice for 15 minutes per night would have a more positive attitude toward reading than similar students who did not have that assignment. The Estes Attitude Scale for reading was given to two classes (high group and low group) of sixth graders in central…