Spear-Swerling receives award

Mon., Dec 21

You Reap What You Read: Examining the Link between Reading Habits, Test Scores

Louise Spear-Swerling (left) doesn't buy the popular notion that if schools and parents could just get kids to read more often, it would solve the problem of poor reading test scores that pervade many Connecticut communities.

It's not that the professor of special education and reading is against pleasure reading. Quite the contrary. But a recent study she has conducted on Connecticut sixth graders shows that what students are reading for fun -- particularly the level of challenge and the volume involved -- is a much more important barometer of how they perform on tests than simply how often they read on their own.

Spear-Swerling recently received the  Professional Achievement Award of the Connecticut branch of IDA (the International Dyslexia Association) for her research on teacher preparation in reading, as well as her  involvement in numerous state policies on reading.  The award cited her "outstanding contributions in advancing knowledge about the science of teaching reading."

Her latest  study, which has been accepted by the peer-reviewed journal, Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, shows that students who have demonstrated strong comprehension skills as measured by the Connecticut Mastery Test, tend to read longer and more difficult selections on their own time than those with weak comprehension skills. Those students are just as likely to say they read for pleasure frequently, but their selections tended to be easier and shorter.

"As educators, we certainly don't want to discourage kids from reading, and even relatively easy reading can have some benefit," she says. "For example, a student who reads slowly might build fluency by reading easy materials for enjoyment on a regular basis."

But Spear-Swerling says that a well-structured voluntary reading program that includes a significant portion of appropriately challenging material would have a more significant effect in boosting students' reading ability, and subsequently, their grades and test scores. This assumes, of course, that appropriately challenging texts are assigned in school as well, with expert guidance from classroom teachers.

The study finds that sixth-grade students with strong comprehension skills tend to read more fiction, while those with weak comprehension skills are more likely to read non-fiction. But she stops short of saying that fiction reading supersedes non-fiction when it comes to boosting students' reading abilities.

Spear-Swerling says the reason for the difference might stem from the types of non-fiction that those with weaker comprehension skills are reading -- such as recipes, lists of facts and shorter vignettes. They typically do not challenge the student as much as longer, fiction offerings do. But Spear-Swerling says easy fiction reading does not particularly challenge students either. She points to the difficulty level and the volume read as being the key factors, rather than the genre or frequency of reading.

The study shows no gender-based differences in ability levels, but gender played a major role in the choice of magazines with very little overlap, according to Spear-Swerling. Boys generally opted to read sports, science fiction and adventure stories, while girls tended to go for selections with social themes.

The study includes 87 sixth graders from three Connecticut schools -- a suburban, an urban, and a magnet school. The suburban children make up about half the total number of students.