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Give
a Kid a Book |
This is
probably stuff we could have figured out by ourselves, but a
couple of recent scientific studies demonstrate the impact of
reading books on children.
One study, conducted by Richard Arlington of the University
of Tennessee, gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their
own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year, for
three successive years. Testing at the end of the three years
showed that these students had significantly higher reading
scores than similar students not in the study.
An even larger and more significant study was conducted at Duke’s
Sanford School of Public Policy by researchers Jacob Vigdor
and Helen Ladd. They studied over 500,000 fifth through eighth
graders in North Carolina and found that the spread of home
computers and high-speed internet access could be directly correlated
to very significant declines in math and reading scores. It
concluded that internet access is not necessarily good for children
and may indeed be harmful to academic performance.
Even more interesting is the fact that this study used data
from 2000 to 2005, a time period well before the Facebook and
Twitter mania that we’ve witnessed over the past couple
of years.
In the recently published book, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr,
the author argues that the internet is leading to a short-attention-span
culture, citing research that shows the degradation of our abilities
to engage in critical and deep thinking.
What is suggested in all three of the above is that reading
a book is different from reading on a computer or other electronic
device. Children who begin reading books at an early age tend
to view themselves as book readers and even take pride in their
“personal libraries” of books. Children who rely
on the internet as their primary method of intellectual stimulation
tend to view themselves according to their ability to navigate
through the “ether” of the internet.
Regardless of which side of this debate you fall on, and even
acknowledging that there is some good internet use, what’s
the harm in encouraging your kids to read books?
There can only be an upside. Give a kid a book. |
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