Girls In Reading Research Articles

ESSAY REVIEW

Educating girls is one of the most significant yet problematic developments of the last 150 years. A girl, in the process of her schooling, learns to layer the messages of a logo/androcentric culture over the insights born of her lived experience, muffling and silencing the still, small voice within. The ubiquitous, aggressively marketed series romances that a girl reads in adolescence are read not as mere fantasy or entertainment but as a road map for life. This compelling romantic ideology channels girls narrowly toward heterosexuality and marriage. The high price that may be paid for investing in the promise of romance is examined against the backdrop of Virginia Woolf's understanding that intellectual freedom depends on material things. The educated woman who teaches comes to her profession many times divided against herself. She is expected to teach the very values her life may have taught her to question. The solution to these problems (if there can be said to be one), is not simply a matter of changing the stories girls read. In a rapidly changing social world the romance is increasingly fundamental to the maintenance of order, critically embedded in the workings of the economy, and a pathway into the compelling archetypal world. Nonetheless, women teaching in a girl-poisoning culture can begin to mitigate the effects of that culture by listening to girls and by honoring their own memories, thereby hoping to genuinely make room in the classroom for the embodied experiences, voices, and values of women and girls.

COMPUTERIZED SELF-ASSESSMENT OF READING COMPREHENSION WITH THE ACCELERATED READER: ACTION RESEARCH

This study was a quasi - experimental action research evaluation of a program for computerized self - assessment of reading comprehension (The Accelerated Reader). It looked at the formative effects on reading achievement and motivation in two schools in severely socio - economically disadvantaged areas . The results suggested that the program , even when less than fully implemented , yielded gains in reading achievement for these at - risk readers that were superior to gains from regular classroom teaching and an alternative intensive method , even with less time devoted to class silent reading practice than in comparison classes . Additionally , the program yielded significant improvement in measured attitudes to reading for girls .

Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and: Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls' Series (review)

Reviewed by: Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and: Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series Alice Phoebe Naylor (bio) Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder by Ann Romines. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997, 287 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $14.36 paper. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, 193 pp., $41.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper. These two critical works have in common the serious consideration of girls’ series books that have been, and are being, read by many millions of children over most of this century. Both Inness and Romines make a fascinating and significant contribution to a feminist understanding of growing up as a female reader of series books and of how those books are constructed. My childhood preceded the Little House books and as an adult student of children’s literature I have never felt the emotional attachment to them that Anne Romines describes as a “consuming passion” (9). Romines has not lost her affection for the Little House, nor her memory of feeling speechless when her grandmother took her to meet Laura Ingalls Wilder. Thus, Romines writes, she hears a “clamor of voices” that inform her about the Little House series: the “raptly reading girl of the 1950’s,” the voices of the book characters, the joint but competing voices of the two authors, and her own feminist scholar voice, so challenging to the girl of the 1950s (10). In each of the five chapters, these voices appear. Romines examines the texts from feminist perspectives: how both the authors and characters wriggle out from under, and still protect, patriarchal domination; feminist and patriarchal attitudes toward multicultural issues raised in the text; [End Page 213] women’s education in materialism, consumerism and domesticity; portrayal of gender and adolescent sexuality; and lastly, how interweaving of multiple plots characterizes women’s lives dominated by patriarchy and contributes to the richness of text for readers. The voice of the authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Lane, is based on collaboration through letter writing and, for periods of time, discussions of inclusions, plot, and characters. Romines believes that Wilder is credited with sole authorship because joint authorship was, and is, frowned upon in the patriarchal system. For the women themselves, collaboration was a daily domestic activity. Writing was already the profession and substantial source of income for both Wilder and Lane when the first Little House book was conceived. Lane was prolific, traveled widely, and made a substantial living on her writing. Her mother wrote primarily for farm and domestic journals. Lane was always interested in writing as a means of earning an income, and she encouraged her mother to write to meet market demands. The two communicated constantly, and often in disagreement, over the formation of each story. At one point Wilder thought she could go it alone, but found herself at a loss without Lane’s help. The failures of their husbands to succeed financially also accounts for Wilder and Lane becoming writers. They were far more successful than the men and the Little House series is still earning money for heirs. The two novels concerned with sexuality and becoming an adult, By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter, seem to reflect the two voices, mother and daughter, with special power and emotion. Romines exposes the myth of sole author of the series, but beautifully illuminates the feminist nature of the mother-daughter collaboration. Romines believes that the foremost dilemma of the authors is how to balance their desire to preserve their father’s narratives with their inclination to “inscribe a girl’s story” (22). Both Lane and Wilder were daughters of “beloved and partially failed fathers who had no male heirs” (24). Pa’s stories, which figure in most of the earliest books, do not include a single female character. His stories portray a single male in battle with nature and government regulations. The central problem of the text, says Romines, is in how to gain female agency and the female storyteller’s voice...

Adolescent Girls: Constructing and Doing Literacy, Constructing and Doing Gender

Book reviewed in this article:Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. By Margaret J. Finders. 1997.Private Practices: Girls Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity. By Meredith Rogers Cherland. 1994.Sounds From the Heart: Learning to Listen to Girls. By Maureen Barbieri. 1995.

Gender and Genre: Reading and Writing Choices of Older Juniors

There has been much recent interest in the reading and writing choices children make and how far these choices are affected by their gender. Differences in the reading preferences of boys and girls seem to become more marked as children move through the primary years. Given that literacy involves control over a range of texts, as reader and writer, teachers seek ways of increasing the repertoire of both boys and girls. The first part of this study examines the reading and writing choices of the children in a Year 6 class in both home and school contexts. The questionnaire responses indicated that the children chose very different genres in the home as compared with the school setting and that gender differences were more marked in the home preferences. The analysis then draws on some of the children’s comments and views in exploring the implications of their preferences and the attitudes behind them. Finally, some strategies for encouraging wider and more reflective reading of both boys and girls are suggested.

Unearthing the Historical Reader, or, Reading Girls' Reading

SUMMARY This study presents an interpretive picture of young female readers of mass-marketed girls'-series fiction in the first decades of the 20th century. In opposition to some book historians who argue that by the late 19th and early 20th centuries reading had become a private and passive rather than a public activity, this study provides documentation of the ways in which girls' engagement with this mass-marketed fiction was intensely public and meaningful. Inscriptions in over 200 series books give some indication of the ways in which the books were acquired, circulated and valued. Fan letters, written by girls to their favorite authors, offer compelling evidence of the collective nature of series book reading. Finally, this study argues that the study of girls' series books and their readers is important for what they reveal about a distinctively new female culture of reading in the early part of the century.

Private Practices: Girl Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity. Meredith Rogers Cherland

Private Practices: Girl Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity. Meredith Rogers Cherland

Preempting the Patriarch: The Problem of Pa's Stories in Little House in the Big Woods

Preempting the Patriarch:The Problem of Pa's Stories in Little House in the Big Woods Ann Romines (bio) When I was a little girl reading the Little House books, the first one, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), was my least favorite. Although an avid fan, I was tempted to skip the long stories from Pa that were set into this book, for I was always eager to get back to the absorbing autobiographical narrative of Laura, with whom I identified strongly. So, many years later, I was surprised to learn that Laura Ingalls Wilder considered those paternal tales her richest material. In 1937, she said that Pa's stories were the part of her childhood that she remembered most vividly and "loved best, " and she concluded, "I have always felt they were too good to be altogether lost" ("Laura's Book Fair Speech," Sampler 216-24). Now, when I look again at the stories Pa tells in this first book, it seems to me that they articulate some of the most pressing issues of the series. Both Wilder and her collaborator, Rose Wilder Lane, were loving, dutiful writer-daughters who had no brothers and no sons.1 They were the heirs of their fathers, and they were the heirs of a patriarchal tradition that valued and articulated male stories far more than female ones. Yet the Little House series is preeminently a narrative of girls' experience. Thus Little House in the Big Woods proposes crucial questions about gender priorities, questions with which its authors would wrestle repeatedly. Was their purpose to preserve a body of male narrative or to inscribe a girl's story? If the Little House series was to continue after this first book, Wilder had to find a way out of Pa's stories and into her own. As I have argued elsewhere, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American women's culture had encouraged Wilder to think of writing as a woman's prerogative, and in the teens and twenties, Lane had urged her mother toward the frank professionalism of the enfranchised New Woman. But in the Depression years, when most of the Little House books were written, there was widespread hostility to such professionalism, especially in rural agricultural communities such as Wilder's Missouri home, which began in the early twenties to experience "an agricultural depression that preceded the general 1930s depression by nearly ten years" (Fink 46). In this climate, women's writing often seemed justifiable only if it served the priorities of traditional domesticity and maternity. According to historian Barbara Melosh, as the Depression widened and more "men lost their jobs, wage-earning women became the targets of public hostility and restrictive policy. One slogan exhorted, 'Don't take a job from a man!'"(1). In many ways, Big Woods reflects these conditions. Ma Ingalls never speaks of her teaching career and her relative affluence before her marriage; now she is unremittingly domestic and would never "take a job from a man. " Much of the narrative is plotted to assure us that the Ingalls daughters too will never infringe on the priorities of patriarchy. Thus, although the book is presented as autobiographical fiction inscribed by a woman, its centerpiece is men's tales, told in Pa's voice. Big Woods is a primer in the gendered division of labor and culture, and Pa's stories provide some of that primer's most important lessons. His tales are largely classic accounts of male adventure, clearly and conventionally plotted. The protagonists are Pa as a child and young man, his father, and his paternal grandfather. These mythic inset stories bring the (male) past into the present, making it seem continuous with the world that young Laura and Mary inhabit. In the first story, for example, Grandpa Ingalls breaks a taboo of the Big Woods, venturing into the forest without the protective attribute of his maleness, his phallic gun. There he is beset by an antagonist, a hungry panther, with a terrifying scream "like a woman" (41). On horseback, Grandpa barely makes it to the safety of his house; as he slams the door, the panther leaps "on the horse's back" (42...

Culture and Power: A Media, Culture and Society Reader

Introduction PART ONE: CULTURE AND POWER Culture and Power - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini The State of Research Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism - David Tetzlaff Post-Marxism - Kuan-Hsing Chen Critical Postmodernism and Cultural Studies Feminism and Cultural Studies - Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey Media, Ethnicity and Identity - Thomas K Fitzgerald PART TWO: THE AUDIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Text, Readers and Contexts of Reading - Shaun Moores Reading Reception - Kay Richardson and John Corner Mediation and Transparency in Viewers' Reception of a TV Programme Teenage Girls Reading Jackie - Elizabeth Frazer What's the Meaning of This? Viewers' Plural Sense-Making of TV News - Peter Dahlgren The Politics of Polysemy - Klaus Bruhn Jensen Television News, Everyday Consciousness and Political Action Women as Audience - Susan Kippax The Experience of Unwaged Women of the Performing Arts PART THREE: THE MEDIA AND PUBLIC LIFE The Alternative Public Realm - John D H Downing The Organization of the 1980s Anti-Nuclear Press in West Germany and Britain The Popular Press and Political Democracy - Colin Sparks From Production to Propaganda? - Philip Schlesinger Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life - Paddy Scannell

Such a simple little tale: critical responses to L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables

1 Queer Children: L. M. Montgomery's Heroines 1975 2 The Decline of Anne: Matron vs. Child 1975 3 Progressive Utopia: Or, How to Grow Up Without Growing Up 1979 4 Calling Back the Ghost of the Old-Time Herione: Duncan, Montgomery, Atwood, Laurence, and Monro 1979 5 The Uses of Setting in Anne of Green Gables 1984-85 6 Anne of Green Gables: The Architect of Adolescence 1985 7 L. M. Montgomery's Portraits of the Artist: Realism, Idealism, and the Domestic Imagination 1985 8 Kindred Spirits All: Green Gables Revisited 1986 9 Sexism Down on the Farm? Anne of Green Gables 1986 10 Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables: The Meaning of Belonging 1986 11 Journeys of the Mother in the World of Green Gables 1986 12 The Female Bildungsroman in Ninteenth-Century America: Parameters of a Vision 1987 13 Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading 1988

Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850-1950.

Part 1 Ideologies in education: divided aims - the educational implications of opposing ideologies in girls' secondary schooling 1850-1950, Felicity Hunt Miss Buss and Miss Beale - gender and authority in the history of education, Carol Dyhouse the ideology of femininity and reading for girls 1850-1914, Deborah Gorham learning through leisure - feminine ideology in girls' magazines 1920-50, Penny Tinkler. Part 2 Inequalities in education: learning her womanly work - the elementary school curriculum 1870-1914, Annmarie Turnbull inequalities in the teaching profession - the effect on teachers and pupils 1910-39, Alison Oram better teacher than hairdresser? - a mad passion for equality, or keeping Molly and Betty down, Deborah Thom. Part 3 Experiences in education: cultural reproduction in the education of girls - study of girls' secondary schooling in two Lancashire towns 1900-50, Penny Summerfield pioneer women students at Cambridge 1869-81 Perry Williams.

Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading

Anne of Green Gables:A Girl's Reading Temma F. Berg (bio) While it is impossible to verify the following statement, I do believe it is true: Anne of Green Gables was the book that most profoundly influenced me as a child and young adolescent. What I remember most about my childhood reading experience of Anne is my sense of total immersion in the story. I was Anne Shirley. I, like Anne, was an orphan. Not literally of course. I had a complete set of parents, but I felt alienated in some undefined way from the world I lived in. I was a lonely, book-ridden child. I had a few friends, but I felt different from even them, and when I was among them, I usually preferred to be by myself, reading in a corner, wishing I could be curled up on a window seat like Jane Eyre. Of course, the houses my friends and I lived in did not have window seats, so I read on sofas or chairs, but I might just as well have been hidden in a window seat. I read Anne's books both because I was a reader and because they confirmed my sense of my difference and apartness. They told me it was okay to be different. Not only did I recognize my self in Anne, but I also used the events of Anne's life as models for my own. I wanted to be as like Anne Shirley as possible. I wanted a bosom friend like Diana Barry. I picked one friend to be my "kindred spirit," but she never seemed to be as good a friend to me as Diana was to Anne. Luckily, though, her mother and my mother did not get along very well, so they almost fit the pattern of Marilla and [End Page 124] Mrs. Barry. However, my friend's mother never forbade me her daughter's company, so we never had to make undying vows of friendship in the face of parental opposition, probably the best stimulant for animating ordinary youthful feelings. While I had difficulty finding a friend like Diana or turning the ones I had into an image of her, I could more easily duplicate Anne's imaginative yearnings and love of reading. I, like Anne, liked to think of myself as a heroine and having a heroine like Anne to model myself on and project myself into made it easier. Just as Anne's reading gave her models, patterns, ways to interpret her experience, Anne and her books gave me models, patterns, ways to interpret and validate my experience. Reading stoked Anne's imagination just as it stoked mine. Though I lived in the city, I used Anne's rural landscape to green my own. I tried to look at the trees along my street and the playground at the end of it through her eyes. I composed long, eloquent descriptive passages as I walked along the streets of my world as a means to enter Anne's. Both by reading the actual books and by reading my own life in their terms, I was able to enter, even if only sporadically, Anne's world. Recently, PBS presented a four-part TV movie based on The Anne of Green Gables series, and because the TV movie seemed so faithful to and yet different from my memories of the novel, I found myself reconsidering what the novel meant to me as a child. The TV series seemed more feminist than the novel I remembered. I didn't remember the women in the novel as quite so powerful as the women in the TV show, or Marilla as quite so warm-hearted under her gruff exterior. And I didn't remember the strong-willed woman school teacher at all. Were these and other manifestations of feminist thought I noticed in the TV series—for example, the obvious comparison between Anne who sought education and her bosom buddy Diana who missed it because her mother thought book-learning was wasted on a girl—present in the novel or simply the addition of a modern screenwriter's sensibility? And, if they were in the novel, why...

The similarities between normal readers and developmental and acquired dyslexics

Recently several people have suggested strong similarities between the symptoms of acquired and developmental dyslexia. It is an interesting suggestion because it offers us a new way of looking at differences among dyslexic children (always a thorny problem) and also a possible explanation for these children's difficulties. However, the symptoms in question could only be used as a basis for such an explanation if they really were distinctive, that is, did not crop up in normal children at the same reading level. We take two attempts to connect acquired with developmental dyslexia, each involving an adolescent girl who read roughly at the level of a 10-year-old child. One of these two girls (Temple & Marshall, 1983) read in a rather similar way to that of a typical phonological dyslexic. The other (Coltheart et al. 1983) resembled a typical surface dyslexic. Neither study included any comparison with normal children, and so one cannot be certain that there was anything unusual about either girl's reading patterns. We gave the tests used in the two reports just mentioned to 16 normal readers, all reading at the 10-year-level, and we found evidence for all the symptoms described in those reports in normal children as well. The symptoms were not abnormal and cannot be used to explain the two dyslexic children's difficulties. We also found strong and systematic individual differences in our normal group along a “phonological to surface” continuum. So our study does two things. One is show that the reading patterns reported by Temple and Marshall and of Coltheart et al. do not provide an explanation of the causes of these children's reading difficulties. The other is to provide a new way of looking at qualitative differences among normal readers.

Leprosy in Northern India

I had a brief study on the occupation of the leprosy patients treated in Ghatampur and Etawah clinics which were established by JALMA in the rural area of Uttar Pradesh State, India. The purpose of the study was to analyze the occupation of L-type leprosy patients in the local society and to discuss the possibility of them as the important source of leprosy infection.The number of the patients who were consulted for the study was 5, 573 (male 4, 632 and female 941) including newly registered patients then. The data were collected in the months of May and June of 1967. The patients were divided into four groups; male adult, female adult, boy and girl groups (both under 14 years old).In the group of male adult, farmer occupied over 60% and labourer showed 16.6% which contained some percentages of the agricultural labourer. After all, over 70% of the male adult patients were agricultural workers. The high percentage of them would be due to the situation of the clinics which were opened in the agricultural areas.In the group of female adult, about one third of them were agricultural workers. A large number of the patients were occupied in the house holding works.In the boy group, 57% was student or school pupil and about one third had various occupations including 18% farmer and 7% labourer.In the girl group, student or school girl was only 23% and 50% was doing house holding works. The percentage of reading girls was much lower than it of the boys.Sixty percents of lepromatous patients in male group were farmers and 18.5% were labourers. In female adult group, a large number of lepromatous cases were occupied in house holding.The person who may or must have a frequent and repeated contact with the people of the local society is shop-keeper or shop-master, greengrocer, tailor, barber, washer man and so on in village bazar and private servant, sweeper, aya (nursemaid) in home. The following person may have a fairly important contact with children; school teacher, driver of riksha, tanga or yukka by which a good number of children (especially more younger children) are going to school or kindergarten every day. These persons may give an important influence to children and babies from the point of the contageous infection of leprosy. Some of male lepromatous patients were occupied in these works in the society.To decrease the infection of leprosy in the society, the enough treatment must be given to the lepromatous patients occupied in the above mentioned works especially in the early stage of the disease.Further, to find out the disease as early as possible, the knowledge about the early signs of leprosy must be given to people of the local society through the public health education and only the repeated efforts in it will lead us to the early dignosis and early treatment' of leprosy.

The Iconography of Ophelia

Significantly, Ophelia is not coached in what to say to Hamlet. Rather, she is supposed to communicate an impression by her visual appearance alone, and it is this that will trigger Hamlet's response. The book she is given provides her with an excuse for being in the lobby alone, but more specifically, in Polonius' plan, it serves to convey an impression of prayerful devoutness. Since Hamlet's greeting to Ophelia (Nymph, in thy orisons etc.) confirms Polonius' strategy, we may well ask why the sight of a girl reading was so readily understood to mean that she was saying her prayers. Annotations of the play generally suggest either that the book Ophelia holds is recognizably a prayer-book, or that, when Hamlet takes notice of her, she is kneeling as if she were praying. Neither assumption is necessarily correct. When Hamlet walks in the lobby reading in Act II, his book is obviously not identifiable, since Polonius inquires about it at some length; there is no reason to suppose that Ophelia's can be more easily identified even when she is seen from a fairly short distance. The supposition that she is kneeling is even more far-fetched, since Polonius has instructed her to walk. It is much more likely that when Hamlet immediately interprets her presence in exactly the way he is intended to, he is to be imagined as responding to an established iconographical language.

Sex Differences in the School Gains of Migrant Children

Sex Differences in the School Gains of Migrant Children

Relationship between Attitudes Toward School Subjects and School Achievement

Attitudes toward school subjects were explored in a group of sixth graders. First, correlations were obtained between ratings of school subjects on the Semantic Differential (SD) and scores on corresponding subtests of the SRA Achievement Series. Significant positive correlations (p < .01) were observed for boys in social studies, arithmetic, and reading and for girls in reading. Second, achievement at the end of the year was predicted from IQ, achievement and SD scores at the beginning of the year. SD ratings contributed significantly to predictions only in the case of arithmetic for boys (p < .01). Third, SD ratings of school subjects at the beginning and end of the year were compared by an anlysis of variance procedure. For both boys and girls, attitudes were significantly less favorable for most subjects at the end of the year.

Some Victorian Juvenile Books

It is possible to learn a good deal about an epoch from the way in which it treats children. Contradictions arise, naturally. We picture the Elizabethans grimly flogging their small men and women through Latin grammar, but need not forget that young children were remembered in the Litany along with women labouring with child and sick persons. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution distinguished artists painted delightful portraits of aristocratic toddlers while waggon‐loads of pauper children (one idiot to each load) were trundled off towards the new northern factories. There is no reason to expect any more consistency from the Victorians. Criticism has been concentrated on their earnestness as well as on their noble doubt. Would we not expect traces of all these qualities to appear in the books written for their children? Somewhere now there is probably in preparation a treatise which will make clear exactly how the agnosticism and the developing local government and the other signs of progress affected the reading of boys and girls.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:The Innumerable Instincts of Man: By Clarke R. Claremont, B.Sc, A.C.G.I., with Prefaces by P. B. Ballard and H. R. Hamley.Alfred Adler, the Man and His Work: By Hertha Orgler, Foreword by O. H. Woodcock, M.D.Child Psychology: By Fowler D. Brookes, with the collaboration of Lawrence F. Schaffer.Environment and Heredity: By Olive D. Maguinness.Human Development and Learning: By Frank S. Salisbury.The Psychology of Punishment: By Arthur B. Allen, L.C.P., F.R.S.A., A. Coll. H., in collaboration with Evan H. Williams.Training in Thought and Expression: By F. T. Wood.Predictable Accuracy in Examinations: By E. R. Clarke.Proceedings of a Conference on Examinations. Dinard, 1938. Edited by P. Monroe.Guidance for the High School Pupil: By E. C. Webster.The Educational Needs of the 14–15 Group: By Arthur Greenough.The Educational Needs of a Rural Community: By William C. Radford.What Do Boys and Girls Read? By A. J. Jenkinson.Dangerous Thoughts: By Lancelot Hogben.Life in the Nursery School: By Lilian de Lissa.Borrowed Children—Evacuation Problems and their Remedies: By Mrs. St. Loe Strachey, O.B.E., J.P.The Measurement of Abilities: By P. E. Vernon.The Growth of Understanding of Geographical Terms in Grades IV to VII: By T. J. Eskridge, Junr.Child Care and Training: By Marion L. Faegre and John E. Anderson.Parents and Children: By Hugh Kingsmill.

Leisure reading of junior high school boys and girls

What are our junior high school boys and girls reading during their leisure hours? What books, periodicals, and newspaper articles are they reading of their own volition ? The answer to these questions is an indication of the influence of English instruction, in our junior high schools, on the pleasure reading of girls and boys. The proper use of leisure time is increasingly important as the leisure enjoyed by the American people becomes steadily greater. The responsibility of the school for so shaping the tastes and desires of the child that his leisure time will be spent in pursuits which will be beneficial to him, or at least in ways which will be harmless to himself and others, is being increasingly recognized. There are certain other aims of education which may be materially furthered by the right kind of reading. It is unquestionably true that ideals of ethical conduct, worthy home membership, and good citizenship are fostered through good reading. The research department of the city schools of Knoxvile, Tenn., assisted by the junior high school English teachers of the city, prepared a mimeographed form upon which the pupils were to record daily for a week all their reading which was not assigned in connection with school work. Students were asked not to sign their names, and were assured that the answers made on the questionnaires would not influence their school marks in the slightest. They were urged to report fully and accurately for each day the names of newspapers read, newspaper articles read, magazines read, magazine articles or stories read, and books read or partly read. Spaces were left for seven daily reports, and the day's reading was given under each of the above heads. At the end of the blank each child was asked to record the names of any continued stories he might be reading, together with the name of the paper or magazine in which they were appearing; his favorite magazines in order of preference, and the novels he had read during the year. The reading record was kept for one week, beginning Sunday, May 9, and ending Sunday, May 15. The children were requested to record their reading at the end of each day.