Expanding Your World Through Books!
Whatever your age or reading level, books have the ability to cross time and reality plunging the reader into new worlds of adventure and excitement. Whether you choose to visit Hogwarts with Harry, solve a mystery with Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, or join the Knights of the Round Table with King Arthur you are guaranteed a great experience unlike any other!
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to analyze the reading habits of children ages 5-18. I hope to use this information to create a website that children, parents, and teachers can access to assess where children's interests lie to help choose appropriate reading material and offer suggestions as to what books may be enjoyed.
Materials Used:
I developed a short 10 question survey that was posted on survey monkey. I also posted my project on globalschoolnet.org.
I administered the survey on line and had quite a few teachers interested in my project. I physically gave the survey to children at our local recreation center and library and entered their responses into survey monkey.
Raw Data
Conclusions/Interpretations:
I found that many older students (13-18) are not reading at all outside of school. The students that were reading, read quite a wide variety of different sources from motorcycle/car magazines and teen magazines to novels such as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Middle School students (9-12) tended to read more outside of school than the high school students for enjoyment. Their reading interests ranged from mysteries, to choose your own adventures, adventure, and teen romance books. Judy Bloom and Beverley Cleary were popular authors for this age group.
Elementary School students read mainly easy books. They tended to enjoy non-fiction books about animals as well. This seemed to be the age at which almost all said they enjoyed books and reading and regularly did it for fun!
The largest problems with my project that I would change if I were to do it again would be to survey a larger group of children during the school year. Since school is not in session, many of the interested teachers could not help give the survey. I would also have created a more detailed survey and included whether it was a boy or a girl taking the survey. I would have also liked to include the reading level of the survey taker. Also, focusing on a single age group such as, elementary or middle school school students, would give much more valuable results. The age group I chose was too large to work with. I was not extremely surprised at the out come of my survey responses, but I was disheartened at the lack of reading by older students. Interest in reading definitely took a nosedive as the children were older. The most commonly listed favorite author was J.K Rawlings and the most common answer for least favorite reading was Westerns and How-To books. Not one student at any age level chose either of these.
I did locate a nice website that gave an index of student interest. This site allowed students to search for books by author or book series.