Telling themselves who they are: What one out-of-school time study revealed about underachieving readers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore whether or not adolescents who are deemed underachievers and who struggle to read school-assigned textbooks will engage with popular culture texts of their own choosing (e.g., magazines, comics, TV, video games, music CDs, graffiti, e-mail, and other Internet-mediated texts). The 60 student participants, who were enrolled in grades 7-9 in a small city school district in the southeastern U.S., self-identified mostly as not being interested in reading. Thirty attended weekly meetings of an out-of-school time media club and kept a daily out-of-school time activity log for 14 weeks (the intervention group); the other 30 were assigned to a comparison group and did not attend the weekly media club meetings but did keep a daily out-of-school time activity log for the same 14-week period. Independent t-tests applied to data from the daily activity logs revealed several interesting contrasts between the two groups. One unexpected finding was the relatively large amount of time that participants in both groups reported they spent reading outside of school. Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.