Reading Practices

What Do Adults Read and Why Does It Matter?

M Cecil Smith

Department of Educational Psychology,

Counseling and Special Education

Northern Illinois University

DeKalb, IL 60115

Running head: READING PRACTICES

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association, Chicago,
IL, October 14, 1994.

DRAFT: Do not quote without permission.

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Abstract

This paper describes a study in which data from the National Adult Literacy Survey were
analyzed to examine the association between adults' reading practices and literacy proficiencies. Reading
practices involved reading five print contents: newspapers, magazines, books, and brief documents for
work and personal use. Literacy proficiences were assessed by performance on three scales: prose,
document, and quantitative literacy tasks. The results showed that reading multiple print contents has a
significant impact on all three literacy proficiencies. Adults who regularly reading even a single print
content significantly outperform adults who do not read on the literacy skill measures. Based on these
results, three principles concerning expert reading practices among adults readers are described.
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Educators and psychologists have long been interested in the kinds of textual materials which
adult read. This interest has been rooted in the desire to understand how various reading practices
contribute to the development of reading skills (Gray & Rogers, 1956), intellectual abilities (West,
Stanovich, & Mitchell, 1993), and to some extent, aesthetic appreciation of literature (Rice, 1986). Gray
and Rogers (1956), for example, undertook an extensive study of maturity in reading. They attempted to
describe the characteristics of those adults who demonstrated extensive use of, and appreciation for,
reading. Gray and Rogers viewed maturity in reading as consisting of three dimensions: reader
competence; broad interests and awareness of reading purposes; and well-developed skill in the selection
of reading materials appropriate for one's circumstances.
The latter characteristic of reading maturity suggests that Gray and Rogers were aware of the
critical importance of practice in the development of reading abilities. They also recognized that reading
practice is rooted in social participation. According to Gray and Rogers, social participation is "that
which leads the individual to a felt need for information, to a process of opinion formation, and ultimately
to a position of opinion leadership that seeks action" (p. 234). Reading practice, then, has significant
cognitive consequences for the reader. Practice involves the selection and use of reading materials to suit
a variety of purposes.
More recently, developmental psychologists have carried out numerous studies of cognitive
development based on sociocultural perspectives of learning and cognition (Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 1990;
Scribner & Cole, 1981). The work of Leontiev (1975) and Vygotsky (1978) has been most influential
here. Essentially, this body of theory and research asserts that cognitive abilities develop via interaction
between individual minds and surrounding social environments. These social environments include the
communities of practice in which people interact with others who possess similar interests, skills, goals,
and the pursuit of kindred courses of action (e.g., the practice of law; scuba diving; teaching).
Gray and Rogers also acknowledge the influence of social contexts on reading practices, stating
that "social role exerts a vital influence on the reading interests and habits of adults" (p. 228), a notion
supported by subsequent research that has examined contextual effects on reading practices (Guthrie,
Siefert, & Kirsch, 1986). These and other studies have demonstrated that the kinds of literacy (i.e.,
reading) practices that adults engage in have a significant impact on developing their reading skills.
The findings from an analysis of adults' reading practices are reported here. The data are derived
from the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS; Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993). The
research reported in this paper examined associations between adults' self-reported reading practices
involving different print contents and proficiency on several measures of literacy ability. Based on the
results of these analyses, I suggest ways in which reading practices may lead to the development of
reading skills. A related purpose is to describe several organizing principles of expert literacy practices in
adulthood and the implications of these principles in developing future generations of skillful readers.
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The recently completed NALS examined, in part, adults' reading practices and the relationship of
these practices to literacy skill. Reading practices were assessed in order to examine associations between
these practices and proficiency on the prose, document, and literacy (PDQ) scales devised for the
assessment. I conducted secondary analyses of the NALS data in order to more fully explicate the nature
of the relationships between specific reading practices and prose, document, and quantitative literacy
skills.
There is likely a reciprocal relationship between reading practice and literacy skills: those who
have opportunities to read (i.e., through availability of printed materials, appropriate literacy models and
instruction) can develop and refine their skills; well-developed skills, in turn, enable the reader to
accomplish reading tasks of increasing complexity. Furthermore, more skillful or proficient readers will
benefit in a greater variety of ways (e.g., cognitive development) than will less skillful readers (West et al.,
1993). The NALS data permit examination of the effects of reading practices on literacy proficiency.
Practices occurring in two broad social contexts--personal situations and work--were assessed.
An idea that links practice to skill is the exposure hypothesis and is evident in the work of
Kirsch and his colleagues (1988a, 1988b), Stanovich and his associates (e.g., Cunningham & Stanovich,
1991), and our own studies (Smith & Stahl, 1993). These studies suggest that exposure to texts provides
practice at literate activities (e.g., reading and writing) and promotes skill in those activities in much the
same way that athletes hone their competitive skills through repetitive practice. Thus, individuals who
read a wide variety of print contents (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, documents) will demonstrate
higher levels of reading skill than will those who read very few contents.
The recent work of Stanovich (West, Stanovich, and Mitchell, 1993), for example, has reprised
the issue of the nature of the relationship between literate behavior (i.e., reading) and cognitive growth.
Although it is widely assumed that reading pays intellectual and social dividends to those who are literate,
this assumption has been challenged by, among others, historians of literacy (Graff, 1979) and some
cognitive psychologists (Scribner & Cole, 1981). Stanovich et al. (1993) have conducted a series of clever
studies testing the exposure hypothesis. Their view is that widespread exposure to print results in
cognitive gains which can be measured through a relatively simple methodology involving recognition of
information (e.g., authors of popular books) found in print sources, such as magazines, novels, and books.
West et al. (1993) administered several such measures to 217 adults who were identified, through
naturalistic observation in an airport waiting area, as readers (i.e., were observed to read, while waiting,
for 10 consecutive minutes) or nonreaders (i.e., did not read while waiting). Observed subjects were then
approached and asked to complete the checklists. Persons judged to be readers significantly outperformed
nonreaders on measures associated with reading (e.g., author, magazine, and newspaper recognition
tasks). Also, readers were superior to nonreaders on vocabulary and general knowledge measures; these
differences held even after the effects of age and education were removed via regression analyses. These
findings demonstrate that simply being a reader makes a difference in terms of enhancing the individual's
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literacy skills. There were, however, no data obtained documenting the types of literacy practices in
which these readers engaged on a regular basis.

ANALYSES of NALS DATA on READING PRACTICES

Two questions are of interest in this research: What are the everyday reading practices of adults
with respect to newspapers, magazines, books, and two categories of brief documents (e.g., for work; for
personal use)? Second, how are these reading practice patterns related to adults' proficiencies on the
prose, document, and quantitative (PDQ) literacy scales?
Method
Analyses of the NALS data involve examination of self-reported reading practices across the
NALS sample. These practices include newspaper, magazine, book, work-related, and personal document
reading. I attempted to determine the extent to which reading practices explain performance on the
NALS proficiency scales (i.e., prose, document, and quantitative literacy tasks) after accounting for
educational attainment.
Overview of NALS. Data were gathered on a nationally representative sample of 26,091 adults,
ages 16 and older, in 1992. Black and Hispanic households were oversampled to ensure reliable estimates
of these groups' literacy proficiencies. Data collection procedures are included in the NALS technical
report (Campbell, Kirsch, & Kolstad, 1992).
Sample. Only adults ages 19 and older were considered in the secondary analyses because most
16-18 year olds are still in school, and so were not considered to engage in typical adult reading practices.
Therefore, the sample size for the secondary analyses was 24,842 adults.
Measures. The NALS results have been reported using three scales, each ranging from 0 to 500,
assessing prose, document, and quantitative literacy skills. The prose scale assessed the knowledge and
skills needed to understand and use information from texts such as editorials, news stories, poems, and
fiction. The document scale assessed the knowledge and skills needed to locate and use information
contained in materials such as job applications, bus schedules, maps, tables, and graphs. The quantitative
scale assessed the knowledge and skills needed to apply arithmetic operations using numbers contained in
printed texts, such as when balancing a checkbook or completing a banking deposit slip.
Scores on each scale represent degrees of proficiency along that particular literacy dimension.
Proficiency scores were based on performance on the survey tasks. Items ranged from easy to difficult,
based upon the structure of the material (e.g., expository text, graph, advertisement), the context of the
material (e.g., work, home), and the nature of the task (e.g., what the subject is to do with the material).
Each scale was divided into five levels which captured the progression of information-processing
skills and strategies necessary to complete the tasks successfully. Skills and strategies required ranged
from locating information in short, simple texts to integrating complex information, generating high level
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inferences, and using specialized knowledge. The five levels and range of scale scores were: Level 1 (0-
225), Level 2 (226-275), Level 3 (276-325), Level 4 (326-375), and Level 5 (376-500). Each task was
assigned to the appropriate point on a scale based on the difficulty of the task, as reflected in the
performance of the overall sample. Additional details may be found in the NALS summary report (Kirsch
et al., 1993).
Reading practices. These practices pertain to Ss' use of five print categories: newspapers,
magazines, books, and personal documents and work-related documents. Recognition of the different
contexts (i.e., work versus personal) in which document reading occurs provides for a fine-grained
analysis of Ss' reading practices. Subjects were asked how often they read a newspaper--every day, a few
times a week, once a week, less than once a week, or never. They were then asked to indicate up to 10
sections of the newspaper (e.g., news, sports, editorial pages, comics, classified advertisements, TV and
movie listings, advice columns) that they generally read. They were also asked how many different
magazines they look at or read in English on a regular basis--0, 1, 2, 3-5, or 6 or more. Subjects were
then asked to indicate which among eight categories of books they had read during the past six months,
including: fiction, recreation or entertainment, current affairs or history, science or social science,
reference, and manuals, inspiration or religion, or "other" types. Next, subjects were asked to indicate
how often they read a series of different document types for personal use and also for work--every day, a
few times a week, once a week, less than once a week, or never. There were six document types: letters
and memos, journal reports or magazine articles (prose), manuals or reference books, directions or
instructions (document), diagrams or schematics, and bills, invoices, or tables (quantitative).
Reading activity was considered to be high for each of the contents if a subject reported reading: a
newspaper at least once a week and reading at least five parts of it; three or more magazines; three or
more categories of books; four or more types of personal documents every day or a few times a week; and,
four of more types of work documents every day or a few times a week. Note that the book data do not
provide an estimate of the absolute number of books read during the preceding six months, but only the
quantity of book types that were read. The quantity of category types read served as the book reading
score for each subject.
Reading patterns. Subjects were classified with respect to their reporting of high or low activity
within each print category. Because five print categories were analyzed, 32 reading patterns were
identified (see Table 1). These 32 patterns were then aggregated into six groups of practices, based on
reading from zero to five print categories, and were compared on PDQ proficiency.

RESULTS

The primary purpose of the analyses of the NALS data was to determine the association of
reading practices with literacy proficiencies. Great variability in Ss' reading practices is apparent.
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Practice patterns are based on high or low reading activity for each of the five print contents, ranging from
low or no reading to high reading activity for all five contents. Table 1 shows the percentages of the
population engaging in each practice pattern. The five most prevalent reading patterns are:
(1) very low or no reading activity among any of the five print contents
(15% of adults); and high reading activity for
(2) books and newspapers only (12%);
(3) newspapers only (10%);
(4) work documents only (9%); and
(5) all print contents (6%).
When the patterns are aggregated into six groups based on the number of print contents read
(i.e., 0-5), nearly one-third of adults (29%) are found to read three print contents on a regular basis. For
the remaining two-thirds (71%) who read two or fewer print contents regularly, this lack of practice with
multiple contents is, for many of these adults, likely to have a negative effect on their literacy abilities.

[-----Insert Table 1 about here-----]

Relationships among the six reading practice groups and PDQ proficiencies are shown in Table
1. Scores on the PDQ measures are found to significantly increase with the addition of a single print
content. That is, adults who regularly read any single print content have significantly higher mean PDQ
scores than do adults who read none of the contents. The average gain is 57, 58, and 60 points for the
PDQ scales, respectively. Reading any two print contents increases PDQ scores, on average, by 23, 20,
and 21 points over one content. Reading any three print contents increases PDQ scores, on average, by
13, 12, and 10 points over two contents. Reading any four print contents increases PDQ scores, on
average, by 11, 11, and 13 points over three contents. All of these gains are significant at p < .001.
Reading all five print contents results in non-significant average PDQ gains of 5, 7, and 4 points.
Two print contents--work documents and books--are strongly associated with higher PDQ
literacy proficiency. Among all 32 reading practice patterns, the highest eight practices--in terms of PDQ
proficiency--involve reading work documents, books, or both. Ten percent of adults restrict their reading
to only work documents; another five percent report reading only books. Among adults who report
reading only books, mean PDQ scores equal 274, 270, and 270, respectively. Adults who read fiction
have the highest prose (M=269) and document (M=263) literacy scores, followed by those who indicate
the "other" category (M=261, prose; M=259, document). There is no difference in quantitative literacy
proficiency between fiction readers and those who read from the "other" books category (M=264 for both
categories).
Reading only work documents is associated with high PDQ literacy scores (M=267, 268, and
274, respectively), while reading only personal documents contributes very little to literacy proficiency
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(M=236, 236, and 238 for PDQ, respectively). Few adults limit their reading to brief documents, but read
other print contents in combination with work-related and personal document reading.
Among newspaper readers, those who are more thorough readers of the paper outperform those
who read only a few sections. For example, adults who read only one newspaper section have an average
prose score of 227, while those who read two sections have an average score of 246; adults who read up to
nine newspaper sections average 292 on prose. This pattern is similar for document and quantitative
literacy tasks. Post-hoc tests showed, however, that there is no significant gain in prose or document
literacy proficiencies when reading more than four newspaper sections, and no significant gain in
quantitative proficiency when reading more than three sections.

DISCUSSION

The results show that more than one-half of the U.S. adult population read at least two print
contents on a regular basis--typically, books, magazines, and newspapers or some combination of the
three. Newspapers are perhaps the most widely read print source. Nearly half of all adults read
newspapers with some regularity. It appears that much of adults' reading practices occur in personal,
rather than work-related, contexts. Book readers and those who read documents in the workplace perform
best on the PDQ tasks.
Document reading is not widely practiced among American adults for reasons that are unclear
since there appear to be numerous opportunities for adults to read brief documents either in the workplace
or at home. It may be that document reading is so ubiquitous that it occurs below the level of individual
awareness. Perhaps documents such as references, recipes, invoices and bills are "skimmed" rather than
carefully read. Thus, literate adults may not be cognizant of the extent of their document reading.
Conversely, because reading instruction rarely focuses on how to read and understand documents, adults
may avoid documents that include complex features such as diagrams and tables that seem
incomprehensible to them.
Reading practices have been shown to make an appreciable difference in adults' literacy skills.
Reading multiple print contents has a cumulative impact on literacy proficiency. Regular reading of even
a single print content--regardless of what that content is--results in significant PDQ gains (i.e., a full
standard deviation) over reading infrequently or not at all. It would not be prudent, however, to claim a
causal relationship between reading practice and literacy proficiency. Those individuals who are skilled
readers may simply be more inclined to read a variety of print materials.
What factors, then, influence the development of reading practices in adulthood? Adults with
more education have an advantage in developing, using, and refining their reading practices. Nearly one-
third of the NALS respondents with less than a high school education do not read any of the five print
contents, and performed at the lowest PDQ levels. Educationally disadvantaged adults do not engage in
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the practices necessary to develop their literacy abilities, and fail to reap the abundant benefits of reading,
such as acquiring important information for living or learning new ideas. Certainly, efforts must be
directed to facilitating these individuals' development of reading practices leading to higher literacy
abilities.
Reading practices are shaped over the course of a lifetime and are influenced not only by
educational experiences, but also through early exposure to appropriate literacy models and behaviors
(Teale & Sulzby, 1986), availability of reading materials (Wigfield & Asher, 1984), and idiosyncratic
interests (Gray & Rogers, 1956). Future research should examine the extent to which these factors impact
reading practices in adulthood.
It is widely acknowledged that massed practice in any number of activities (e.g., playing chess,
acting in a musical comedy, hitting a baseball) leads to improved performance. This study is the first to
demonstrate that such an association is true for reading in adulthood--particularly within a national
sample. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that engagement in reading practices has
measurable cognitive consequences for adults (Reder, 1994; Stanovich, 1993). Reading practices consist
of contextually determined behaviors and sets of skills used to accomplish specific purposes (Scribner &
Cole, 1981). A reciprocal relationship exists between practices and skills: being a skillful reader helps the
individual to engage in an array of literacy tasks with some measure of success. This illustrates what
Stanovich (1986) has called "Matthew effects" in literacy development. That is, skillful readers become
ever more proficient through their reading practices.
Interpretations of the reading practices examined in this study are limited to the extent that there
were no NALS data pertinent to the relative quality or linguistic complexity of the different kinds of print
materials which adults read. Also, the full extent of adults' reading practices was not assessed. For
example, how much time and effort, and for what purposes or goals, is devoted to reading various print
contents? What sorts of cognitive demands are present in the textual materials which adults typically
read? Such information would be useful in further clarifying the relationship between reading practices
and literacy skills. Despite these limitations, the data do provide for a very conservative test of the effects
of reading practices on literacy proficiency. It is clear that the broad types of reading practices that were
assessed in the NALS contribute in important ways to the development of adults' literacy skills.
Cognitive psychology research has demonstrated the effects of practice on experts' performances
in domains such as chess (Chase & Simon, 1973; deGroot, 1966), thoroughbred handicapping (Ceci &
Liker, 1986), and radiology (Lesgold, Rubinson, Feltovich, Glaser, Klopfer, & Wang, 1988) and on tasks
such as memorizing a random series of numbers (Chase & Ericsson, 1981). Gray and Rogers (1956) held
that adults were capable of skillfully selecting reading materials appropriate to individual circumstances.
One hypothesis is that some adult reading practices, such as text selection, have an expert quality to them.
Practice at reading also pays cognitive dividends. West et al. (1993) found that adult readers
evidenced superior knowledge over non-readers on a series of "cultural literacy" tasks. Because multiple
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print contents provide the best opportunities for individuals to acquire broad, deep knowledge of the world
(Stanovich, 1993), young and old alike should be encouraged to develop a broad repertoire of reading
practices. The essential nature of expertise in reading may not lie so much in the comprehension of what
is read (although understanding is important), but rather in the kinds of decisions the reader makes about
what and when to read, and how to do so, in order to meet a diversity of demands. Such behaviors are
likely to result in higher literacy abilities.
Based on the evidence from our research, we propose three principles that underlie expert
reading practices. These are as follows:
(1) Adult readers develop expert skills through exposure to and use of as wide a variety of text contents as
possible.
(2) Expert reading practices can be viewed, in part, as constituting intelligent decision-making about
when and what to read in order to accomplish specific tasks and satisfy particular goals.
(3) Contextually-determined situations and events, in interaction with the individual, shape reading
practices and outcomes.
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Ceci, S.J., & Liker, J.K. (1986). A day at the races: A study of IQ, expertise, and cognitive complexity.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115, 255-266.

Chase, W.G., & Ericsson, K.A. (1981). Skilled memory. In J.R. Anderson (Ed.), Cognitive skills and
their acquisition (pp. 141-189). Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Chase, W.G., & Simon, H.A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55-81.

Cunningham, A.E., & Stanovich, K.E. (1991). Tracking the unique effects of print exposure in children:
Associations with vocabulary, general knowledge, and spelling. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 83, 264-274.

deGroot, A. (1966). Perception and memory versus thought: Some old ideas and recent findings. In B.
Kleinmuntz (Ed.), Problem-solving (pp. 19-50). New York: Wiley.

Graff, H.J. (1979). The literacy myth. New York: Academic Press.

Gray, W.S., & Rogers, B. (1956). Maturity in reading: Its nature and appraisal. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Guthrie, J.T., Seifert, M., & Kirsch, I.S. (1986). Effects of education, occupation, and setting on reading
practices. American Educational Research Journal, 23, 151-160.

Kirsch, I.S., Jungeblut, A., Jenkins, L., & Kolstad, A. (1993). Adult literacy in America. Washington,
D.C.: The National Center for Education Statistics.

Kirsch, I.S., Jungeblut, A., & Rock, D.A. (1988a). Reading newspapers: The practices of America's
young adults. Princeton, NJ: National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Kirsch, I.S., Mosenthal, P., & Rock, D.A. (1988b). The influence of reading patterns on the proficiencies
of young adults. Princeton, NJ: Unpublished manuscript.
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Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Leontiev, A.N. (1975). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Lesgold, A., Rubinson, H., Feltovich, P., Glaser, R., Klopfer, D., & Wang, Y. (1988). Expertise in a
complex skill: Diagnosing X-ray pictures. In M.T.H. Chi, R. Glaser, & M.J. Farr (Eds.), The
nature of expertise (pp. 311-342). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reder, S. (1994). Practice engagement theory: A sociocultural approach to literacy. In B.M. Ferdman, R-
M. Weber, & A.G. Ramirez (Eds.), Literacy across languages and cultures. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press.

Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smith, M C., & Stahl, N.A. (1993, April). Adults' reading practices and activities: Age, educational, and
occupational effects. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association. New Orleans, LA.

Stanovich, K.E. (1986). Mathew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the
acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.

Stanovich, K.E. (1993). Does reading make you smarter? Literacy and the development of verbal
intelligence. In H.W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior, Vol. 24 (pp.
133-180). New York: Academic Press.

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Reading Research Quarterly, 28, 34-50.

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Table 1: Mean PDQ Proficiency by Reading Practice Patterns

Practice % of sample X Mean gain in PDQ

Pattern Prose Doc Quant n % contents read X no. of contents read

0 contents group P D Q
00000 201 197 197 3689 15.1 0 contents: 15.1

1 content practice patterns

00001 251 247 252 2237 9.5 1 content: 31.0 57** 58** 60**
00010 243 242 241 665 2.7
00100 274 270 270 1378 5.0
01000 236 236 238 103 4.6
10000 267 268 274 430 9.2
n=4813
2 contents practice patterns
00011 266 258 263 1106 2.7 2 contents: 24.7 23** 20** 21**
00101 284 277 279 2602 11.9
00110 286 279 279 885 0.4
01001 264 260 263 171 0.7
01010 254 247 249 69 0.3
01100 286 282 282 171 0.9
10001 283 283 292 477 0.6
10010 279 280 288 153 1.9
10100 301 300 306 307 0.9
11000 258 262 271 108 4.4
n=6049
3 contents practice patterns
00111 292 282 284 3275 1.7 3 contents: 18.1 13** 12** 10**
01011 275 267 274 179 2.0
01101 287 282 284 581 0.7
01110 290 285 282 262 1.5
10011 295 292 302 342 1.1
10101 301 296 300 800 3.0
10110 312 309 312 338 1.4
11001 283 281 285 159 5.5
11010 290 288 295 69 0.5
11100 295 297 298 155 0.7
n=6160
4 contents practice patterns
01111 297 288 289 1223 0.3 4 contents: 5.3 11** 11** 13**
10111 311 303 309 1395 1.0
11011 290 292 299 231 0.6
11101 305 301 304 588 2.1
11110 313 309 311 307 1.3
n=3744
5 contents practice patterns
11111 309 304 306 1636 6.0 5 contents: 6.0 5 7 4
@
n = 26091 101.3%

KEY: Practice pattern sequence is work documents, personal documents, books, magazines, and newspapers.
There are 32 reading activity patterns.
0=low activity ("less than once a week", "never"); 1=high activity ("every day," "a few times/once a week")
 Reading Practices
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Table 1: Continued.

KEY:

Example: 00100 = High activity on book reading; very low or no activity on all other print contents.

* : significant @ p < .05

** : significant @ p < .001

@= Total over 100% due to rounding.

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