Teens Today Don't Read Books Anymore
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“Teens Today Don’t Read Books Anymore:” A Study of Differences in Comprehension and Interest Across Formats A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jessica E. Moyer IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor: Dr. David O’Brien July 2011 © Jessica E. Moyer, 2011 i Acknowledgements Thanks first and foremost to my husband and family who helped me in dozens of ways as I finished graduate school, my research, and the writing of this final document. In particular I thank Dr. Christopher A. Moyer for his help in designing several of the figures that appear below. Dr. David O’Brien has been an outstanding advisor, and I’m particularly grateful that he (for the most part) let me go ahead and do exactly what I wanted. Dr. Cassie Scharber was a most helpful committee member, especially her insightful comments on the final drafts. Dr Terry Weech has been involved with my career for many years I was grateful that he was able to serve on my committee and share his many years of expertise in library and information science research. Dr. Richard Beach, for chairing my defense committee in his final week before retirement, and sharing several useful papers. Last, but not least, Kaite Mediatore Stover for an outstanding job with the final proofreading. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my family: my husband Christopher, my cats who kept me company as I wrote (past and present) Mitt, Tiggy, Smokey, and Charlie, my dogs who made me take breaks, Callie and Stewart, and my parents Larry and Sharon Jones, who always believed I would be able to do this. iii Abstract In this study each of the female college student participants read 4 to 6 pages of the print text, read an equivalent amount of an ebook, and listened to approximately 10 minutes of an audiobook. For each modality participants experienced one of three different texts. The order in which the texts and modalities were received was randomly assigned. Engagement and motivation were used as frameworks for this study. In the experiment, interest and engagement in each text were measured through an interest inventory. Participants filled out the same measure after experiencing each text, providing a consistent, comparable measure across formats. Comprehension was the other framework, and the outcome measure used to assess it was the Content Reading Inventory (CRI), a tool commonly used by classroom teachers. This research found no statistically significant differences in comprehension across print, ebook, and audiobook modalities. Participants’ levels of comprehension for each text were the same regardless of the format in which it was received. There was also no difference in engagement across modalities; the amount of interest participants expressed in a text was the same regardless of the format in which it was received. In other words, the text that was the least popular, was equally unengaging in all three formats. iv Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................................... VI LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................................................... VII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................... 1 PURPOSE AND GUIDING QUESTIONS ............................................................................................................ 4 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................................................... 5 Audiobooks ............................................................................................................................................. 6 E-books and Online Reading ................................................................................................................ 26 Reports and White Papers .................................................................................................................... 39 College Students and E-book Reading ................................................................................................. 42 Consumer and Publisher Data ............................................................................................................. 43 Libraries and E-books .......................................................................................................................... 44 E-books and E-book Readers Internationally ...................................................................................... 47 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS .................................................................................. 56 A NEW DEFINITION OF LEISURE READING ................................................................................................. 58 WHAT IS READER RESPONSE THEORY? ..................................................................................................... 59 Rosenblatt’s Efferent and Aesthetic Reading ....................................................................................... 59 Langer’s Contemporary Perspective on Reader Response Theory ...................................................... 63 ENGAGED READING ................................................................................................................................... 69 ENGAGED READING: THE SOCIO-CULTURAL VIEW ................................................................................... 73 HOW DO THE THEORETICAL READING EXPERIENCES OF ROSENBLATT AND LANGER COMPARE TO ENGAGED READING? ................................................................................................................................................... 75 Relationship Between Leisure Reading, Engaged Reading, Aesthetic Reading, And Efferent Reading .............................................................................................................................................................. 77 Relationship between Aesthetic Reading and Efferent Reading and Fiction and Nonfiction Text Reading ................................................................................................................................................. 79 AUDIOBOOKS, E-BOOKS, AND ONLINE READING ....................................................................................... 85 E-Book Readers and Online Reading ................................................................................................... 85 Audiobooks ........................................................................................................................................... 88 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY .............................................................................................................. 93 GUIDING QUESTIONS .................................................................................................................................. 93 BACKGROUND AND ROLE OF THE RESEARCHERS ....................................................................................... 93 PROCEDURES AND DATA SOURCES ............................................................................................................ 95 Study Design ......................................................................................................................................... 95 Pilot Testing .......................................................................................................................................... 95 Recruitment ........................................................................................................................................... 96 Selection of texts ................................................................................................................................... 97 DATA SOURCES ........................................................................................................................................ 100 Comprehension Measure .................................................................................................................... 100 Interest and Engagement Measure ..................................................................................................... 101 Reading Survey ................................................................................................................................... 102 EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOLS .................................................................................................................... 102 CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS AND RESULTS ............................................................................................ 106 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ......................................................................................................................... 106 Comprehension ................................................................................................................................... 107 Interest ................................................................................................................................................ 110 Correlations ........................................................................................................................................ 113 v SURVEY DATA ........................................................................................................................................