Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot determine how individual components work alone or in…

This article critically reviews the personalization logic embedded in reading recommendation systems developed for 2- to 11-year-old children and its (dis)alignment with Papert's constructionist and socio-constructionist theories of learning. It is argued that the current design fails to incorporate the computer culture that Papert envisioned for…

England's Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP) commissioned the National Literacy Trust to conduct a survey at the start of a Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF) project to improve reading in primary schools in the city. The survey was based on a questionnaire used nationally to gather responses from nearly 50,000 children and young people…

The conversation around reluctant readers continues to focus on boys, with research, practice and policy exploring what could be done to (re)engage boys in reading (see National Literacy Trust, 2012; Department for Education, 2019; OECD, 2021). Girls who don't enjoy reading or who don't read in their free time are seldom the focus of interest,…

Background: In the present paper, we investigated the association between time spent reading and reading comprehension throughout the lifespan. According to the Matthew effect (or rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer) model, interindividual differences in reading-related skills between poor and average readers become wider as individuals grow…

Parental text messaging interventions are growing in popularity to encourage at-home reading, school-attendance, and other educational behaviors. These interventions, which often combine multiple components, frequently demonstrate varying amounts of effectiveness, and researchers often cannot determine how individual components work alone or in…

In this practitioner inquiry, the teacher researcher found that a culture of high-stakes testing had pervaded her diverse, urban seventh-grade students' conceptions of reading; students associated reading with tests and skills-based worksheets rather than pleasure. Using students' voices, passions, and interests, the teacher researcher broadened…

It has long been thought that encouraging children to read is likely to be beneficial for the development of their literacy skills. However, a lot less attention has been paid to the issue of whether what students read matters for their academic progress. This paper therefore considers the association between the frequency young people read five…

Reading skills are an important component of academic success for school-age youth, and are associated with increased academic performance and positive attitudes about school. The presence of an animal appears to reduce stress during reading. Therefore, the goal of this study was to assess the feasibility and effects of a 6-week after-school…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

The author tells the story of a 5th-grade teacher who challenges her class to take on self-identities as readers. Students defined seven characteristics of what it means to be a good reader and considered whether those characteristics applied to them: Good readers read for fun, talk about books, usually finish the book they're reading, can relate…

Regular recreational reading offers benefits across a range of literacy outcomes, as well as supporting learning in other subject areas, offering cognitive benefits, and potentially fostering empathy. Therefore, increasing frequency of engagement in recreational reading can play an important role in addressing inequity in literacy outcomes once…

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…

This study aims to enhance our understanding of how mothers of first graders cope with the perceived reading difficulties of their children. Their different perceptions stem from the reading aspirations the mothers have for their children. The study uses data obtained from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 mothers, conducted at the end…

Reading skills and social-emotional competencies are two important skills for both academic achievement and long-term quality of life. The present study evaluated the effects of a school-based intervention to promote reading skills and social-emotional competencies in young adolescents from urban, low socioeconomic status (SES) communities in…