What Kids Are Reading

 

Renaissance^® has released its 2019 edition of its annual What Kids Are Reading report. For the first time, the study includes book difficulty data from MetaMetrics^®️.

This year’s report finds that literacy advocates have their work cut out for them: Nearly half of students read less than 15 minutes per day, while research shows that double that—30 minutes or more—is linked with accelerated reading achievement gains. However, reading time isn’t consistent across all grades. It peaks in elementary school, then begins to decline after fifth grade and never recovers. In high school, the typical student is reading no more than 10 minutes per day.

To help educators and families encourage students to read, the report offers information about the most-popular books for each grade, cross-curricular lists on topics such as science and social-emotional learning, and tips on how to help students maximize the effects of the time they do spend reading. Reflecting students’ growing access to digital texts, the report also highlights some of students’ favorite digital reads in each grade. 

New to this year’s report, a Lexile^® text complexity measure is included with each title, in addition to an ATOS^® reading level, to help educators find texts at the “just-right” reading level for each of their students.

Other key findings of the report include:

• There is an average 12,000-word gap between students who read 30 minutes or more each day and those who read for less than 15 minutes a day;
• Students who read an average of 30 minutes or more each day make nearly double the percentile rank improvements of students who read less than 15 minutes per day; and
• Students typically read at the bottom of recommended text complexity recommendations for their grade and end up far below the levels required for college and career preparation
  
  
  Throughout 2019, Renaissance will offer blog posts that delve into additional data on topics not included in the report, such as:
  
  
• Comparisons of state-specific data;
• Nonfiction and student reading;
• Additional cross-curricular lists; and
• The importance of reading at the appropriate level of difficulty and complexity.
  
  
  The full report is available free of charge at www.renaissance.com/wkar/ along with additional tools, including a Custom Report Builder tool that uses filters such as state, grade, difficulty level, and more.
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