‘Decline By Nine’: Reading For Fun Plummets At Age Nine, Data Shows

Daily Wire ^ | 5/7/24 | By Mairead Elordi

[CFW]

Reading for fun sharply declines around age nine in an alarming trend that coincides with years of learning loss since the pandemic, data shows.

Only 35% of nine-year-olds are reading at least five days a week compared to 57% of eight-year-olds, according to the latest Scholastic survey on the issue.

“The number of kids who say they love reading drops significantly from 40% among eight-year-olds to 28% among nine-year-olds,” the Scholastic report notes.

The trend, dubbed the “decline by nine” has concerned researchers, who note that reaching reading proficiency by third grade is a good predictor of academic success.

[snip]

Additionally, teachers increasingly focus less on encouraging young students to read entire books and more on assigning them excerpts, taking a lot of the fun out of reading, children’s book author Joanne O’Sullivan told Slate.

[CFW]

Many parents teach their children to love reading and then send them to school where the teachers teach them to hate it.

[BlueLancer]

What kept my interest in reading as I passed thru the elementary grades was use of the SRA ...

A Box of Nostalgia: The SRA Reading Laboratory
Elizabeth Allen, May 4, 2017 (https://bookriot.com/a-box-of-nostalgia-the-sra-reading-laboratory/)

I’m the type of nerd who spent a good amount of my energy trying to will my teacher into giving us silent reading time. I’m the type of nerd who shot my hand up the instant the teacher called for someone to read aloud so fast I swear my rotator cuff is still jacked. And I’m the type of nerd who had my sights set on that well-worn box in the corner of my 4th grade classroom like it contained all the wisdom of man and womankind.

Ahhhh… the SRA Reading Laboratory. It resided deep in the hearts of all bookish elementary school students in the ’80s and ’90s… second only to that Holy Grail of Book Nerds, The Scholastic Book Fair. And the goal? To make your way through the rainbow and to prove that you’re the ultimate reader (I don’t remember having lots of friends in elementary school, now that I think about it).

The premise? This giant box of gloriousness was full of stories, each one assigned a particular color based on developmental milestones. Students initially took a brief test to determine what color (reading) level they should start at and then were given a story on card stock labeled with that color. After reading the story, you answered a series of reading comprehension questions related to what you just read. Successfully make your way through enough of these stories and you got to move on to the next color in the box. Educators used this as a way to both teach reading comprehension and to get a better understanding of the reading levels of their students. And let’s be honest, the air of competition helped some of us lazier students.

The SRA Reading Laboratory was designed in 1950 in rural Florida by Dr. Don H. Parker. A thirty-two children schoolhouse was the origin of an educational tool that would last for over 50 years. His previous experience in the psychological field would give him insight that made teaching all children from the same material seem antithetical to his knowledge of the developing minds of students. Driving through the countryside with an overloaded car, Parker visited K-12 students throughout rural Florida to administer reading tests. Faced with the daunting task of having to hand-grade 3,000 tests, Parker enlisted some of his school’s most intelligent seniors and they began to score the tests. In plotting the scores, the traditional bell curve began to materialize, giving his theory about the role psychology plays in education merit. Individual differences in learning capacity and speed had to be taken into account if educators were going to successfully raise a generation of readers. Dr. Parker’s school did not have the budget necessary to purchase entirely new and separate workbooks for each of the students based on their individual developmental levels. However, there was a series of workbooks containing 40 lessons each that could be purchased for a dollar. Parker proceeded to divide each of the lessons up into folders to be completed and then passed on to the next student. These folders were labeled with a color instead of a grade or number, as to avoid the stigma of reading levels. Each folder came with a key that gave the individual students the ability to grade their own work. All of these materials went into an old tomato box. And it was a success! The students in that country classroom began to not only focus on their education, but they began to take responsibility for their own education in a way rarely before seen. Within a week of schlepping around that tomato box, some of the students showed an improvement of up to three years in their reading abilities! After many rejections, Science Research Associates reached out to Dr. Parker in 1955, looking to add a reading component to their existing educational materials offering. In 1967, the SRA Reading Laboratory kit received its first 1,837 advanced orders at $39.95. Educators can still purchase a (much more technologically advanced) version of the SRA Reading Laboratory from McGraw-Hill Education. And to date, over one hundred million kits have been sold in over sixty-three countries. Dr. Don H. Parker died in 2000, but he changed how decades of children were taught to effectively read. And I personally suspect that this man is one of the reasons I, myself, fell in love with reading. Thank you, Dr. Parker!

[BlueLancer]

And I passed through the elementary grades in the early 1960s ...

[Mogger]

It's the method of teaching reading.

Kids are taught to memorize supposedly 20,000 words like Chinese characters, and guess at any they don't know.

They are not taught how to use phonics to sound out words.

Up until they are 9 or so the books they read have a limited vocabulary so they can read most of the words.

After that they encounter more and more words they cannot read.

So they give up.

The only ones who "get it" are those to read the Holy Bible, which has phonics in it, go to Montessori, are taught by parents or rogue school teachers or remember from a past life.

[Psalm 73]

For the last 20 years I've been using my lunch hour one day a week to read to a first-grade class at an inner-city school.

If they learn to enjoy books, (hoping my joy or reading rubs off on them), that is their ticket out of the ghetto.

And it's the most sane hour of my work week.

[CaptainK]

Thanks for the information. I’ll be looking into it for my grandbaby.

[Paisan]

Many parents teach their children to love reading...

Mine did too. Constantly, I would be reprimanded by my teachers for hiding a book behind my math text.

But, my mother also had a unique way of making me read for fun.

Hidden in the attic was a massive supply of books that my parents had read when they were young.

We were told that we were NOT to touch those books under penalty of severe punishment.

Of course, those were the books we devoured...

[hinckley buzzard]

The best thing parents can do is to make sure their children to see them reading. Books or magazines, makes little difference. That will instill reading into their identity, and no teacher will be able to dislodge it because reading is not primarily connected with school. Becoming an independent reader also contributes to becoming an independent thinker.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Reading for fun sharply declines around age nine in an alarming trend

Probably a strong correlation with the age at which kids get their first smart phones.

[Doctor Congo]

9 years old is about the time kids should start reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. And there is Encyclopedia Brown, Henry Huggins and a bunch of others that will fill in the time until they graduate to science fiction.

[NewHampshireDuo]

I remember when I was a little kid dreaming of the day I could read a newspaper or a book. I’ve always loved reading and there’s always a stack of books beside my chair and bed.

[MarDav]

Ugh! Now I’ll have nightmares. My 5th grade English teacher, who was likely a member of Hitler’s gestapo in another life, used to torment those of us who lagged behind in our SRA readings. Then, of course, the torture was complete as she would have us read Moby Dick.

[bravo whiskey]

My mom and dad bought a set of world book encyclopedia for me when I was young. It was an extravagant expense for us. We got the least expensive of the three because, even then, they knew I would take care of them. I used to grab a volume and sit down and read it.

[BlueLancer]

I guess I was lucky in my teachers. All of my grade school teachers just left the SRA boxes in the back of the room and, if we had finished our in-class tasks, we were allowed to use the SRA box to keep us occupied. No pressure on anybody (at least none that I ever recognized).

[dfwgator]

"Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again."

[NewHampshireDuo]

I think my parents got the World Book set when I was around 9. They had a really old encyclopedia (Source Book) that I loved because of the old pictures and articles. There was also a huge, also old, one volume encyclopedia that actually had things like a schematic of a 1930s vintage radio, etc.

[BlueLancer]

I loved the Hardy Boys series. I collected them all as they came out ... at least the old ones. The newer ones aren't, in my opinion, as well-written as the older ones.

Another of my favorites was "The Thinking Machine" series by Jacques Futrelle. (The Thinking Machine.)

"This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as “The Thinking Machine,” is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels problems of outrageous criminous activity in dazzlingly impossible settings. He can escape from the inescapable death-row “Cell 13.” He can fathom why the young woman chopped off her own finger. He can solve the anomaly of the phone that could not speak. These twenty-three Edwardian-era adventures prove (as The Thinking Machine reiterates) that “two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time.”"

I was later amazed to learn that Jacques Futrelle was one of the passengers who went down on the Titanic. Returning from Europe aboard the RMS Titanic, Futrelle, a first-class passenger, refused to board a lifeboat, insisting his wife, Lily, do so instead, to the point of forcing her in. She remembered the last she saw of him: he was smoking a cigarette on deck with John Jacob Astor IV. He perished in the Atlantic and his body was never found.

[lastchance]

You have that so right. Also parents may stop reading once their children get to that age because they think the children get enough assigned reading at school and for homework.

[DIRTYSECRET]

You are all wrong. It’s the siren song of puberty that does it.

[CatDancer]

Yes, parents and grandparents need to step up. Mine were giving me Nancy Drew, etc, from age 8, and caught me reading Forever Amber when I was 10. (Locked that one up.) So when my grandson was 10, I was sending him Jack London, H G Wells, Kipling. He became a real reader - and a Marine.