A new study shows that, though summer reading is important, children do not necessarily have to digest literary classics during the three-month vacation to maintain and expand their reading skills.
Results of three years of research, done by UT professors Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen, show that children can choose their own books to read and the effect on reading skills is equal to attending summer school.
The study began with 1,330 randomly selected Florida schoolchildren in first and second grade. A test group of 852 students were each offered 12 free books from a choice of 600 different titles.
A control group of 478 children were given activity and puzzle books instead.
Books that children could select were split into four classifications: culturally relevant, curriculum relevant, popular series and pop culture.
Culturally relevant books were written by minority authors, focusing on minority characters and reflecting minority life experiences.
Curriculum-relevant books were tied to the children’s science or social studies subjects for the next year: students entering fourth grade might have selected a book on Florida geography or history.
Popular series books include those focusing on characters such as Captain Underpants and Harry Potter.
Pop culture, which ended up being home to some of the most popular books in the study, centered on books about popular figures, from musicians Miley Cyrus and Shakira to tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena Williams.
"In general, those last two categories of books — popular series and pop culture — were ones that kids were likely to select, about 80 percent of the total," Allington said.
The study lasted for three summers — until the children were in fourth and fifth grade. The effect of reading these books was significant.
"The kids who got free books made as much growth during the summer as kids in another study made in going to summer school during the summers," Allington said.
Allington said the effect was twice as high among the poorest children in the study.
The study was conducted in schools that, on average, had 85 percent of the children eligible for free lunch programs, whereas the national average is 40 percent eligible, he said.
Children making up the test group were 95 percent minorities. Some of them came from very urban backgrounds, McGill-Franzen said, while others came from extreme rural settings and farmland.
Yet during the first year of the study, the popular book choice was universal.
"The most popular book was the unauthorized biography of Britney Spears," McGill-Franzen said.
Other popular choices were a biography of another entertainer, Lil’ Romeo, and popular series centering on peer characters like Captain Underpants and Junie B. Jones.
These results — and the philosophy that children should choose any book over school — or parent-selected ones — have caused a great stir. An Aug. 2 New York Times article about the study has more than 200 comments as of press time, with readers debating the central issue: whether children should choose their own books.
"The most popular ones, the character is feisty, immature and sneaky," McGill-Franzen said. "... That's totally the antithesis of what librarians or teachers would think of as heroes."
Allington argued that the reading curriculum in schools is recycled with few modern choices mixed in.
"You're talking about books that were on the curriculum, not just before the Internet, but before we had copy machines," he said.
McGill-Franzen said kids identify not only with the characters in the series books and the popular books, but also with other readers of those books.
"They're reading them because their friends are reading them, and they want to be a part of that reading culture," she said. "It's part of their social identity."
Even when kids do make connections with school-chosen books, she said teachers and librarians invariably choose depressing titles.
"Who wants a steady diet of really, really sad books?" she said.
Allington said the approach schools take to summer reading is wrong.
"Lots of English teachers and lots of parents do absolutely the opposite of what they need to do if they want to take advantage of the power of independent, voluntary reading," he said.
Books chosen for summer reading lists or classroom curriculum during the summer often do not reflect children's taste, he said. It's this philosophy that hinders independent reading.
He expects the blame for the "summer slide," what educators call the lapse in reading and dip in reading skills during the summer months, to go to electronic media, bad parenting or bad teaching.
The highest-poverty, lowest-achieving schools in Tennessee spend $300 per child on workbooks, test preparation and Xerox copy, he said, whereas buying children 12 books for the summer, like was done in the study, would cost about $45.
He said workbooks simply make teaching easier and allow the principal to exert more authority on the school. Meanwhile, test preparation — after so many hours — reaches a point where its positive effect on test performance levels off and even becomes negative.
"It's not that schools don't have the money," he said. "They just don't have the brains."
Allington proposes additional ways to encourage reading in the summer months, such as making school libraries open and altering the schedules of librarians and reading specialists to 11-month, fourday- a-week plans to cover most of the summer.
McGill-Franzen said it was imperative to honor children's choices in order to foster those that are engaged in reading and want to read independently.
"I think it might be a middle-class phenomenon to tell your kids, 'Oh no, you can't go out. Turn off the TV, no video games. You have to read,'" she said. "... And they set the egg timer. Parents wouldn't have to do that if kids were engaged in their reading."