Is Zoella to blame for fall in teen pupils’ reading skills?
WITH millions of teenage fans tuning into her videos, she’s the most famous girl you may never have heard of.
But now YouTube star ‘Zoella’, and other children’s book authors, are being blamed for a decline in pupils’ reading skills.
Secondary school children are falling dramatically behind in their reading because they stick to basic books such as those by JK Rowling, rather than more ‘challenging’ literature, a study suggests.
Teenagers also prefer to stay with Rick Riordan’s fantasy novels, more commonly read by primary pupils, as well as the Harry Potter series and Zoella’s ghostwritten novels.
The study, conducted by Keith Topping, professor of educational and social research at Dundee University, examined the reading comprehension and habits of 848,219
‘Not as challenging’
children at 3,897 primary and secondary schools.
It was based on an analysis of software that assesses the books children read and their understanding of those stories. The study found primary pupils ‘typically push themselves to read more complex books than secondary pupils’.
In the final year of primary school, pupils’ ages typically match up with their expected reading age.
However, by the first year of secondary school, aged 11-12, their reading age falls behind their actual age by one year.
By the time pupils reach their GCSEs, their reading age typically falls to at least three years behind.
Two books by Zoella – whose real name is Zoe Sugg – Girl Online and Girl Online: On Tour claimed the top spots in a list of favourites, followed by Harry Potter books the Deathly Hallows and the Order of the Phoenix. Professor Topping said Miss Sugg’s books were ‘not as challenging’ as he would like ‘given that they’re popular with secondary aged children’.
‘We wouldn’t wish to tell children what these more challenging books should be because that would be a very top-down, didactic, authoritarian way of going about it,’ he added.
‘But we can certainly give them the broad message that they need to be reading more challenging books and leave them with some freedom of motivation to seek out these books themselves.’