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Does Reading Practice Go With Reading Performance?

Since the beginning of education, teachers, students, and parents have wanted to know how much reading practice gives the most benefit for students. Seeing the relationship between reading test scores and number of pages read each day for school starts to get at this question.

See further discussion below. 

Test Scores and Daily Pages Read – Data Explorer, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute for Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/dataset.aspx  (NAEP Reading Composite scale score, National, Grade 12 (2005), Grades 4, 8 (2007), Factors Beyond School | Time use outside of school | Pages read in school and for homework)

Results:

1. Generally, reporting more reading relates to higher reading test scores, up to 20 pages per day in 4th and 8th grade and above 20 pages per day in 12th grade.
2. This, or course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the additional reading caused the higher test scores.
3. All of the scores were below the NAEP ‘Proficient’ achievement levels for each grade.
4. Of the three grades, 12th graders who report reading more than 20 pages per day came closest to meeting the ‘Proficient’ level.
5. Note that the pages read values are from student survey answers, not independent observations.

Implications: Generally, more reading means higher test scores. More specifically:

1. The highest achieving 4th and 8th graders say they read between 16 and 20 pages per day for school.
2. The highest achieving 12th graders say they read more than 20 pages per day for school.
3. There is a gap between the reading scores and NAEP proficiency standards at all three of these grade levels.

Authors:
National Center for Educational Statistics, Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Publishers:
National Center for Educational Statistics, Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Study Description: 
The analysis compares student survey data on daily pages read for school obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Data Explorer and the Reading test scores achieved by these students.