Reading Trade Books in a Freshman Biology Course‪.‬

Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, depicts a clear but bleak picture of the current status of reading. The survey sampled more than 17,000 adults and covered many demographic areas including age, gender, education, income, religion, race and ethnicity. Some specific findings of the study include: "the percentage of adult Americans reading literature has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years," "the decline in literary reading parallels a decline in total book reading," "literary reading is declining among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics," "literary reading is declining among all education levels," and "the steepest decline in literary reading is in the youngest age groups." Reasons for the decline in reading are many, but several sources point to television and the rise of Internet use, which is taking away from the reading audience. The importance of reading is rarely questioned. "Why read?" is usually answered by educators as a method to both expand a person's vocabulary and to introduce new ideas (i.e., learn). Reading researchers point to the use of words in cognition; the development of thoughts and ideas require the use of words and thus the more words that are available, the more thoughts that can be developed. These claims, and many more advocating the importance of reading, have been reinforced hundreds of times by studies examining the role of reading and early childhood education (e.g., Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001; Shonkoff ST Phillips, 2000). Clearly, children who read, and read in large quantities, perform better in school than children who do not.