https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5705-7954
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ABSTRACT
It has long been thought that encouraging children to read is likely to be beneficial for the development of their literacy skills. However, a lot less attention has been paid to the issue of whether what students read matters for their academic progress. This paper therefore considers the association between the frequency young people read five different types of text (comics, short stories, books, newspapers and magazines) and their scores on standardised reading and mathematics tests. Drawing upon large longitudinal census data from the largest administrative region in Spain, we find that frequency of reading comics, newspapers and magazines is not associated with the development of children’s cognitive skills. In contrast, there is clear and consistent evidence of a positive and increasing association between the frequency children read books and their academic achievement. We consequently conclude that recommended reading time for children should be focused upon the time they spend reading books and not other material.
Acknowledgments
The data used in this research has been provided by Agencia Andaluza de Evaluación Educativa, Consejería de Educación, Junta de Andalucía. This work has been partly supported by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under Research Project ECO2017-88883-R; the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa de la Junta de Andalucía under PAI group SEJ-532 and the postdoctoral contract from the Plan Propio signed by the Universidad de Málaga.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.
Notes
1. Students who have repeated a grade are different in many ways to the rest of the student population. As we do not believe it is possible to control for this wide array of factors in our analysis, we have chosen to focus upon only students who have not repeated a grade (García-Pérez, Hidalgo-Hidalgo, & Robles-Zurita, Citation2014).
2. A missing flag has been employed to avoid dropping observations with missing data upon other covariates. We have tested the robustness of our findings to using multiple imputation instead, with little substantive change to our results.
3. These population descriptive statistics do not include those students who were repeaters in the course 2008/09 to make them comparable with the sample descriptive statistics.
4. Examples here could include the work of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g. The Gold-Bug) or H. P. Lovecraft (e.g. The Call of Cthulhu).
5. For example, Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.
6. A socio-economic status index (economic, social and cultural status, ESCS) was used. This was derived by the survey organisers via a principal component analysis, using the highest from mother’s and father’s education, the highest from mother’s and father’s occupation, the number of books at home and household possessions.
7. A full set of results, including all parameter estimates for all covariates, are available as online supplementary material (Table A1, A3, A5, A7, and A9).
8. Full parameter estimates for all model specifications and covariates are available as online supplementary material (Table A2, A4, A6, A8, and A10).
9. There was no evidence of a positive association between frequency of reading comics, newspapers or magazines and achievement at any point along the reading test score distribution.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
John Jerrim
John Jerrim is Professor at the Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education, University College London, 20 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AL, London; email: [email protected]. His research interests include the economics of education, access to higher education, intergenerational mobility, cross-national comparisons and educational inequalities. He has worked extensively with the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, with this research reported widely in the British media. He has won the inaugural ESRC Early Career Outstanding Impact award and has received an ESRC grant to study cross-national comparisons of educational attainment and social mobility.
Luis Alejandro Lopez-Agudo
Luis Alejandro Lopez-Agudo is a Dr. researcher at the Departamento de Economía Aplicada (Estadística y Econometría). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales. Universidad de Málaga. Plaza de El Ejido s/n, 29013, Málaga (España); email: [email protected]. He holds a degree in Business Administration and Management and a degree in Economics, both by the University of Malaga. He has also finished a MSc of Research in Economics and a PhD in Economics and Business. His research interests are focused on economics of education: the study of education production functions, students’ behaviour and education effectiveness and efficiency, with specific emphasis on the gender and equality areas.
Oscar D. Marcenaro-Gutierrez
Oscar D. Marcenaro-Gutierrez is Professor at the Departamento de Economía Aplicada (Estadística y Econometría). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales. Universidad de Málaga. Plaza de El Ejido s/n, 29013, Málaga (España); email: [email protected]. He moved to the University of Malaga after working three years at the London School of Economics. He has been working on projects focused on economics of education and labour market. His research interests specially include: education production functions, efficiency, time use, teachers’ satisfaction and students’ behaviour. He has published more than 50 papers, many of them in journals with high impact index. At present he is the head of the Research Projects Evaluation Committee at the Spanish Ministry of Economics.