Heartwarming stats from young readers

As part of Learning by Questions’ Electronic Literature Festival, we asked hundreds of primary aged students about their reading attitudes and habits. After a month long celebration of reading, some of the findings were unexpected in all the best ways!

A heartwarming 50% of pupils believe that reading is primarily a pleasure, and 93% think that studying books is important.

Teachers often feel a huge burden of responsibility when it comes to encouraging their students to read, and all too commonly it feels like an uphill battle. But our survey suggests that these efforts have not fallen on deaf ears. 93% of students thought that reading was an important part of their education. Perhaps even more surprisingly, only 10% of pupils felt that reading was for studying and 50% saw it is a purely pleasurable experience.

73% prefer reading traditional books, but 75% prefer answering questions online.

The majority of students who completed the survey preferred the traditional hardcopy print of a book: 73% of them to be exact. But despite this yearning for literal page turning, when it came to answering questions, students preferred answering questions on digital devices.

60% think it’s possible that digital devices will take over from traditional books in the future.

Students also professed to having little faith in the future of traditional books, despite their preferences. 60% of them believed that it was possible digital devices would take over from books in the future.

39% had not visited a library for more than 3 months

Sadly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, only 39% of students had not visited a library for more than 3 months. This statistic seems to mirror statistics gathered by the Labour Party in March 2019. The research that was commissioned by the party showed a 38% decrease in number of books borrowed in UK libraries from 2011 to 2018 with library closures are occurring up and down the country every day.

62% picked books based on an author they had previously enjoyed.

Over 60% of the students who completed the survey chose books written by an author they had previously read and enjoyed. Who is your class’ favourite?

35% would prefer to be gaming than reading.

Becoming more and more of a competitor, gaming was preferred over reading by 35% of students who completed the survey. Keep on beating that drum, teachers of reading!

Our Electronic Digital Festival has come to an end, but our bank of reading resources continues to grow! Find out what new Question Sets we published last week, and access 1000s of Question Sets by registering for a free LbQ account.