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 paper focuses on students' reading habits--whether traditional reading habits (print books) or modern reading habits (using a computer screen). We review the changes in students' reading habits over time, as part of other global changes, and explore whether corresponding digital pedagogies have evolved to address these changes. We examine…

The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One…

Describes a questionnaire study of Australian undergraduates and a community sample that investigated the reading of books as a recreational activity and considered individual characteristics. Topics include the amount and nature of reading, attitudes toward reading, measures of social resources, scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire,…