Pop Quiz

Ann Cunningham and Keith Stanovich have unearthed some astounding findings in their research with plenty of implications for primary reading instruction. After establishing many benefits of extensive and wide reading, they went about to determine the antecedents of students who read widely. They performed a longitudinal analysis of 11th graders whom they had studied as first graders, which leads us to our pop quiz question. Which of the following 1st grade measures is the greatest predictor of 11th grade reading habits?

1) Intelligence

2) Decoding, word recognition, and comprehension


Stay tuned tomorrow for the cliffhanger answer... or just read the article and show your stuff ... or guess and hope for the best.

You call that wide reading?

I previously mentioned Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich's article What Reading Does for the Mind and will be making several posts from this research. They cited a study done by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) which analyzed the out-of-school time use by fifth graders. Here are some highlights. The average student was reading about 5 minutes a day which equates to 282,000 words a year. If you improve that reading to 21.1 minutes a day you will read over 1.8 million words a year. Only 10% of the students in that study were reading at that rate. Imagine if we could get every student to read a paltry 30 minutes a day - which I believe most teachers "assign" regularly!! What would be the impact on vocabulary development, knowledge, and ability.