I’m glad to see that some of the observations I’m making about myself and society are being noticed by other people too. I believe some posts ago I shared my concerns about my vocabulary levels dropping and through conversations with my boyfriend I’ve also complained about my lack of independent reading. It seems these days I’m so caught up with school that the only literature I’m participating in is for the class setting and nothing for my own personal distraction. As much as I come home and catch up on my rss feeds (blogs/news) it’s not the same. On Monday The New York Times had a very interesting article about a drop in test scores being directly correlated to a decrease in independent reading, here’s a bit of the article written by Motoko Rich:

Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans– particularly young Americans– appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

That is the message of a new report being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of date from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Department and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all reading including nonfiction.

In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all. [The New York Times, Arts Section, p. E1]

I’ve been highly concerned about my own reading levels and last week I remember sitting with some of my school mates and discussing this very matter. When I first entered middle school I remember the teachers putting up a reading chart and my school required us to read at least 25 books for the year. I went well above 50 because I needed to be number one, I know, I turn everything into a competition. However, this tactic of displaying the number of books each student had read clearly made me read more. Then again, I do realize that I’m in college now and the amount of work, plus the level at which I’m working at, is a more difficult than those days, but still, I don’t want to fall victim to this study. Anyway, I just wanted to share some knowledge.