Did the Stanford study really examine pleasure reading and critical reading?
Re: Reading Literature Not Only a Pleasure (Language Magazine, October, 2012).
Language Magazine, in press
Stephen Krashen
The recent report on a study done by Stanford researchers on the difference between “pleasure reading” and more “serious” reading seems to support recent claims by Common Core advocates that we need to push heavier reading more in school. After all, it was found that “critical reading” stimulates blood flow in areas responsible for problem-solving, and involves “the coordination of multiple complex cognitive functions,” while lighter reading seems not to.
The research is still unpublished, so we don’t yet have all the details. From media reports, however, it is clear that the “pleasure reading” condition did not come close to real pleasure reading: Subjects did not select the book, and the pleasure reading was Jane Austen, not everybody’s choice for relaxing, interesting reading. True pleasure reading is self-selected and compelling, completely absorbing, even for the grad students in English literature who served as subjects.
(In previous work in this area done by Victor Nell (Lost in a Book, Yale University Press, 1980), subjects selected their own reading; they were asked to bring a book they were currently reading and deeply involved in.)
In addition, the academic reading was inauthentic. From information provided by Scientific American, subjects were asked “to read with heightened attention to things like formal structure and literary themes and patterns. Later, they were told, they would have to write a literary essay on those sections they had read critically.” Subjects were thus asked to analyze a text given to them, by an author they may or may not be interested in, and focus on form as well as meaning.
True academic reading involves finding the answers to questions you pose yourself,, that you are deeply interested in. Also, true academic readers are focused on what the text says, not how it says it.
Phillips’ results may only apply to reading in very artificial situations, in other words, reading in school.
The conditions investigated in this study appear to be only dim reflections of real pleasure reading and real academic reading.
An argument of relevance regarding “pleasure” versus “critical” reading? Get a grip. ["Phillips’ results may only apply to reading in very artificial situations, in other words, reading in school...[T]he conditions investigated in this study appear to be only dim reflections of real pleasure reading and real academic reading.” (Krashan)]
There’s the answer to the question.
More importantly, what are our students learning in the classrooms? I travel to many districts and find that, in general, both the expectations and accountability required from the readers and the level of depth of understanding, for either “pleasure” or “more serious” written material, has slowly degraded over the last several years. Academic reading or otherwise. The demand for mastery of critical thinking skills regardless of the subject matter or written style is now confined to a more cursory examination and less a more prehensive learning experience for the student reader.
I go into classrooms and ask students to provide a critical comparison between fiction and non-fiction, between “pleasure” and “academic” reading materials. For the most part, their responses reflect little training in critical thinking. About 80% of any general ed. class can’t even provide a correct response when I ask them to explain the difference between compare and contrast, regardless of the style of writing (for class required reading–academic or otherwise). I have found that more “serious” reading and understanding of fiction and non-fiction style to be mostly an expectation in AP classes. In most general ed. classes, when I ask for a copy of students’ annotated bibliographies, or how they use the MLA or APA styles, they look at me like deer in the headlights.
All of this is not due to lousy, unprepared teachers or some kind of mysterious loss of student intelligence. It is due to the continuously mandated (and non-mandated) changes in the curriculum and instruction that persists in a ridiculous journey of discovery for the silver bullet that will produce high test score outcomes. Based upon rubrics which most teachers haven’t the time to instruct sufficiently.
The increasing degradation in critical thinking abilities typically coincides with the inception of NCLB, the scaffolding for our now infamous RTTT scam. Primary and secondary teachers are being increasingly hammered with more and more useless value added measures at the expense of student learning. And the loss of time to teach students needed skills is now invading higher education.
It has recently been reported that it now costs students more to attend the California State College campuses due to not only overcrowding, high housing costs, and cuts in staff, but to the increasing time spent in remedial classes, especially in the language arts. Therefore, in many cases, students can take a couple of extra years to graduate.
The growing political demands of increased value added measurements and testing in higher education produces a divide in education. A divide where only those who can afford a private school education can attend, Where greater opportunity exists for more in-depth instruction as there are no barriers to instruction time as there are in public colleges due to time consuming measurement and evaluation requirements.
This growing private corporatization of public schools will soon leave the question of critical thinking, academic versus pleasure reading, moot. I have yet to find growth in programs for those students who would choose to forgo higher education for quality trade schools as part of a free and public education. Yet the pipelines from schools to prisons continue to burst at their seams. The probity in the American educational system is endemic, as miasmatic as America’s growing rate of poverty, coinciding with the ever growing distance between the haves and the have-nots. So much for everyone getting an equal shot at the American Dream, relegated to the dream of a gone world.
Brilliant suggestion!
ugh ugh–thanks again, Steve. The idea that there’s no pleasure in reading a good, well-written history, or essays in science, etc, etc! Poppycock. What we need to do is encourage “professionals” to write in ways that help educate both their colleagues and the larger public.
Maybe doctorates should require that a candidate “translate” his primary doctoral ideaz into an essay or more that can be acceptable to an ordinary “good” magazine, or attract a substantial lay audience, etc.