The Inertia of Non-Reading: Exploring factors that impact middle school readers
- Dramatic changes in attitude
By middle school age, the nature of students’ reading performance and their attitude toward leisure reading undergoes dramatic change
You may notice that where an elementary age child is fairly easy to select books for, by middle school all the sudden they don’t like anything they used to
- Little reading outside of school
By reputation, middle school children do not choose to read independently, outside of school (too many other distractors – –) Their social needs tend more toward phones, Internet, gaming
- Less exposure to ideas and vocabulary
When they avoid reading, they have less exposure to ideas and vocabulary; time spent reading is linked to reading and writing competence
- Little voluntary reading = lost academic ground
Even if they were not initially remedial readers, students who do not do voluntary reading eventually lose academic ground: this becomes the “Inertia of Non-Reading”