Research on the Power of Reading, curated by Donalyn Miller

Donalyn Miller has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and for teachers looking to support reading as a good use of time for their students.

A few stand-out quotes:

“A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone became a reader.” —Nancie Atwell

and

"Do we really need research proving that kids who read the most outperform kids who don’t read that much? Do we really need research proving that when readers are engaged with what they read they invest more effort in reading? Do we really need research proving that when kids have books in classrooms, libraries, and homes they read more?" —Donalyn Miller

Those last questions may be rhetorical, as Donalyn proceeds to list research and resources that do back up those statements with evidence.

 The part that's really inspiring, for those of us who create books for children and teens?

"when readers are engaged with what they read they invest more effort in reading"

So it's up to us, too. To create books that engage our young readers. Page-turners, fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, poetry, words and images and stories they'll want to read.

Let's do just that.

Here's a link to Donalyn's full post, I’ve Got Research. Yes, I Do. I’ve Got Research. How About You?

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee

To Honor Anna Dewdney, Read To A Child

Llama Llama series writer and illustrator Anna Dewdney died this month, and, in passing, she did something pretty remarkable. As it says in her Publishers Weekly obituary (which was picked up by the Washington Post),

She requested that in lieu of a funeral service that people read to a child instead.

That's a beautiful legacy. Go do it, now.

And after you've read to a young person in your life, take a moment and read this powerful piece Anna wrote a few years ago that was published in the Wall Street Journal, How Books Can Teach Your Child To Care, on how reading builds not just empathy, but human beings.

It includes these lines,

When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I will go further and say that that child then learns to feel the world more deeply, becoming more aware of himself and others in a way that he simply cannot experience except in our laps, or in our classrooms, or in our reading circles.

Thank you, Anna.

Illustrate and Write, and Read to A Child On,
Lee

Reading Can Transport Your Brain... And Not Just As A Figure Of Speech

This article in Emory University's eScience Commons by Carol Clark, summarizing the latest research on reading and our brains, was fascinating.

The University's researchers, lead by neuroscientist Gregory Berns, found:

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

...“It remains an open question how long these neural changes might last,” Berns says. “But the fact that we’re detecting them over a few days for a randomly assigned novel suggests that your favorite novels could certainly have a bigger and longer-lasting effect on the biology of your brain.”

Pretty heady stuff!

Their research was published by the journal "Brain Connectivity."

Illustrate, Write, and Keep Changing Brains On!
Lee

Reading To Boost Your Emotional Intelligence

We know reading is good for you, good for kids, good for teens, good for everyone.

We know about Catharsis.

We know about Empathy.

And now, maybe we need to add Social Skills as a benefit of reading as well.

A new study published in the journal Science was discussed in the recent New York Times article by Pam Belluck, For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

"It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking."

The parsing out of what kinds of books were beneficial to read and the guesses as to why ranged from interesting to, well, elitist.

Are the findings ammunition for teachers who want to teach "literary fiction?"

Does it hurt those of us who write everything else?

How does this fit in with the new Common Core?

And does this even apply to children and teens, and to kids' and teen books?

There are so many questions this study brings up.

Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd, researchers in the New School for Social Research’s psychology department, are continuing to research the connection between reading and emotional intelligence. They're even asking for volunteers here.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee