Gender wars

A new survey traces the divide between elementary boys’ and girls’ reading tastes | Susan Olasky

What do kids like to read? Figuring out the answer to that question would make authors, publishers, teachers, and parents happy. Renaissance Learning, parent company of Accelerated Reading (AR), believes it knows the answers based on the number of AR quizzes taken by children in grades 1 through 12 on 115,000 different books for which quizzes are available. In 2007 more than 3 million students in nearly 10,000 schools used AR's internet-based system, allowing Renaissance Learning to track 78 million books read and to develop detailed statistics about the reading tastes of boys and girls by grade and region.

Based on the report, it's possible to make some generalizations about the reading tastes of elementary schoolchildren. Although boys and girls read many of the same books, starting in 2nd grade real differences show up. Since many of the lists include titles that are probably chosen by teachers as either read-alouds or class books, the differences aren't as pronounced as they might otherwise be, but it's clear that girls are more adventuresome readers than boys, who often stick with the authors they like; girls tend to be more eclectic.