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Learning To Read With Click and Jane
theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"
Correlation is not causation. Presumably, it is not the mere presence of the books, shooting off their "bookly cosmic rays," that is the causal force which leads to children doing better on tests. Rather, there are two presumable possibilities, both of which probably work concurrently:
1. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are generally of above-average intelligence, and hence produce offspring that are as well.
2. The kind of parents who own a lot of books are likely to either read books to their children, encourage their children to read themselves.
The medium through with the information is conveyed likely matters very little, if at all, and so long as the children receive adequate instruction on how to access materials to read, and encouragement to actually do so, they will fare just fine.
It's not the books that cause the kids to do better. It's the fact that type types of parents who stock their houses with books are those who will produce better children. In other words, the books don't cause the good output, they simply reflect the environment that causes the good output. Thus whether one learns to read via books or computers isn't important; it's mainly what the parents do.
Children who grow up with the web should read incredibly well. The web is a massive library and without being able to read you won't be able to do much in internet and computer land. It solves a huge problem for parents and that problem is getting children interested in reading in the first place.
That said, a child growing up on the internet will be exposed to improper punctuation and grammar more frequently than a child growing up reading proofread and edited printed materials. That is probably a good thing. Those children will be less pedantic, and have less difficulty discerning intent and meaning from written text.
This is no different than the gamer generation versus their parents. The problem was not merely that the parents had difficulty with electronic interfaces, the problem was they had difficulty adapting to varied interfaces. The gamer generation can hope between operating systems, not to mention individual applications for the same purpose without too much difficulty. Their parents could learn and master an OS or application but when confronted with something different had/have a great deal of difficulty.
Why? Because every console video game has a unique and non-standard interface. Instead of learning the interfaces themselves, gamers learn the common elements that need to be and should be present in all video game interfaces. When they pick up a new game they don't stare at the foreign interface confused they start by figuring out how to navigate and then immediately proceed to look for the elements they know should be there and take note of extras found along the way.
That difference in how a new (insert almost anything here) is viewed while minor gives amazing flexibility when presented with tasks and arguably is the difference between genius and ignorance.
OK, the whole point in the chapter in 'Freakonomics' was that while the number of books in a child's home IS CORRELATED with how well they do on school tests, IT IS NOT A CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP. Essentially, families that put an emphasis on learning tend to have both smart kids and a lot of books, but simply having a lot of books around does not appear to make children smarter. The person who quoted 'Freakonomics' in this article either intentionally misrepresented the point, or (more likely) completely missed the point. The point was that we should quit spreading the exact fallacy that is being spread here.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
Who modded this comment 'interesting'? more like troll...
Your comment is total BS. 2nd generation 'working class', we get by paycheck to paycheck, and that didn't keep us from acquiring a 4000+ volume library over the years - some from my own childhood.
It has entirely to do with interest in knowledge, not wealth. If you were raised with that, you'll wind up with books.
An interest in money doesn't correlate at all with knowledge - look around at the economy today. It took some finely focused stupidity to create this mess.
Books are NOT expensive. Compared to the plethora of other ways to waste 10-30 bucks, a book is an investment. A GOOD book is a gem.
Or, a really good source of free children's books is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org). It has thousands of free (current and public domain) books from around the world, many of them available in multiple languages.
- Ben Bederson Professor Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland
Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.
I read books online at both the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/ and Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/. Other than being able to click directly to the chapter I'm at, and to scroll instead of turn the page, I don't consider it a "very different" experience. Perhaps you meant that short-form reading -magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, cereal boxes- is a very different experience from long-form reading. And most web material tends toward essays, articles and short blurbs. There's nothing about the words being displayed as pixels rather than blobs of ink that makes for a different experience, at least for me. I understand that some people find it more difficult to focus on a screen for long periods compared to paper. But then again, some people find glossy laptop screens to be annoying as well.
I have a 2.5 year old son. About 6-8 months ago, I sat him on my lap and I clicked through the ABCs of starfall every night. He would point to letters, laugh at cut scenes, and basically bond with me. I let him put his hand on mine as I navigated the site. Then I started letting him click the mouse to advance the letters and games. I would point to the mouse cursor as it moved across the screen with his hand on my hand as I moved the mouse. He made the connection and started taking over the mouse. His gross motor skills frustrated him when trying to do some of the finer details of the website, but that improved to the point where he could handle the website. Part of the site has a concentration-esque game of flipping over tiles and matching them. Well, my wife and I were in the bedroom watching TV with him in the same room as he was surfing Starfall. We look up to see what he is doing and he had accessed the game already matched two tiles. Flabbergasted. I watched him do it, and it was all random. Then, he started remembered the letters and would return to the correct tile when he saw it again. The progress he has made has blown my mind. He reads his letters and numbers. He has been on parts of Starfall I didn't know existed or how to get to! Also, every night I review the letters and numbers with him using ToddlerLock on my G1. He looks forward to it and scoots over in his toddler sized bad for me. I have to fold myself in half to position next to him. Good times. And my 9 month daughter is already taking an interest in the G1. I had to extract it from her mouth today, turn it off, and let the drool dry out! Ahhh, I love my kids.
Grew up dirt poor. Like... half a step above "christmas is for other kids" kind of poor.
That said... My mother recognized my desire to read and learn at an early age... so when I asked if we could get an encyclopedia set.... She found a way. A few weeks later, a local grocery store started selling a new volume of the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia... one at a time, every two weeks I think it was. We weren't able to afford a new volume every time one came out, so we skipped around a bit... but when the set was done, and the store went back to the As... we got the ones we were missing.
And boy did I think that was cool. The minute we bought a new volume, I'd obsess over it. The words and concepts I didn't understand I'd ask about. I got my first dictionary and my first thesaurus that way at a yard sale... Thinking back, it was very cool what my mom did... There were a lot of things that she didn't know, but she always found a way to help answer my questions.... and more importantly - she'd learn with me so that she could better understand the things I'd want to learn and be able to help me more in the future.... and we'd read and discuss what we read...
Got my first library card (shortly after we completed the encyclopedia set) from the hospital library (I was kind of sick growing up, but I digress..)... and when I wanted to know more about something from the encyclopedias.... the librarian and my mom would help me out. I started spending a great deal of time there, and eventually exhausted their very small collection of books. So I discovered the public library system, and intra-library loans... and then inter-library loans. I got my second library card when I was nine because my mom couldn't afford the gas to take me to the library more than once a week, and my library card was only good for a dozen books I think.
I started building my personal library when I was fourteen and got my first summer job. My family wasn't rich at that point, either, and neither was I.... but used books from the library are cheap, and I discovered used book stores. An friend of mine used to drive me up to Half-Price Books, which I thought was the coolest place ever.
Anyway... the point of all this being that I have several college degrees, my own business, and I'm a partner in three other businesses. I went from being so broke that Kool-Aid was a treat.... to being 20 years old, too young to drink, and making more in a month than most people make in a year. When the economy changed, and I wasn't able to travel for personal reasons.... I re-tooled my business, adapted, and came out pretty damn well. I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that the secret to my success was the never-say-die attitude, the intuition, the hunger for understanding, and the resourcefulness that I learned from books and the mother who always found a way to entertain my curiosity.
Without books, and without the kind of parenting and tutelage I had... I can say for a fact that I wouldn't be the person I am.