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Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#111

Post by moate »

jondubois wrote: post #19

I never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.

That's quite the story you spun there...

(see what I did?)

What is fiction? How is it different from philosophy? What about soft sciences like sociology or psychology that rely heavily on trying to interpret human behavior (presumably based on their warped, distorted brains). What about theology? How about art as a whole? Or music?

Are you trying to propose that ENTIRE world would be better if there were no fictional creations?

IDK my dude, this seems like a pretty extreme and indefensible position...

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#112

Post by StillBored »

I wonder how outdated/lagging these studies are.

When I was a kid I was reading nearly every waking moment between say 3rd grade and 9th because It was the only form of entertainment I had (until I got a computer). That is because my parents thought that TV rotted a child's brain and didn't have one in the house until after I left.

Today, my kids read, but they have phones, TV's, computers, and a ton of other distractions that have proven nearly impossible to control without an outright ban in the whole house.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#113

Post by JamesBarney »

fhood wrote: post #2

I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.

I think most parents with large household libraries are probably pretty bright. And most kids from pretty bright parents are pretty bright too.

You could fill a library with all the studies that tried to improve people's lives through increased reading. And none of them replicated in large way.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#114

Post by pjmorris »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #86
fhood wrote: post #2

I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.

>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm…

We had a few books at home, but more at my grandparents and my mom worked as a librarian for awhile. Reading was always for enjoyment and fun, so it was easy to read when 'required.' I never struggled with standardized tests. I was shocked and disappointed if I wasn't somewhere in the 90+ percent range on a test, and once scored an 800 on the GRE.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#115

Post by SamReidHughes »

rossdavidh wrote: post #48

Halfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their country (for number of books in their h…

I'll bet you equally good correlations can be found when the parents have a Kindle library that the kid doesn't have access to. You'd expect articles like this to have a paragraph, "The researchers controlled for biological heredity by ________" but it seems they don't want you to take them seriously.

Edit: Oh, they also show that growing up in a home full of books makes you more numerate, too. So, no surprise, there's a general intelligence factor involved that has nothing to do with books.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#116

Post by fein »

StillBored wrote: post #112

I wonder how outdated/lagging these studies are. When I was a kid I was reading nearly every waking moment between say 3rd grade and 9th because It was the only form of entertainment I had (until I got a computer). That is because my parents thought that TV rotted a child's brain and didn't have one in the house until after I left. Today, my kids read, but they have phones, TV's, computers, and a ton of other distrac…

> and a ton of other distractions that have proven nearly impossible to control without an outright ban in the whole house.

So your parents were right.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#117

Post by kurttheviking »

tombert wrote: post #67

My parents would basically (with a few exceptions due to price) buy me any book I wanted growing up (without it hitting into my allowance); they thought it was incredibly important to grow up well-read, and even more important to learn how to teach yourself stuff, and similarly every standardized test I took was insultingly easy. I'm definitely not some pillar of intellectual vigor either (I don't even have a college…

>That said, I realize that one anecdote doesn't mean anything.

Nevetheless, I appreciate the hack you suggested of excluding books from allowance. As a parent, that's something I'll now implement. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#118

Post by frockington »

austinheap wrote: post #89

When I would get in trouble as a kid my mom would ground me for a certain number of books. As I got older/wiser/in-more-trouble the requirement moved from # of books to # of pages and she'd test me on random sections of the readings. A++ productive way of dealing with a difficult child!

I would've loved to see the creativity that went on between you trying to get through as many pages as possible and your mom trying to ensure you read them

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#119

Post by bsenftner »

fhood wrote: post #2

I grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.

I grew up in a house of readers. My earliest exposure was a 500+ comic book collection before I knew how to read, which graduated to children's novels by early elementary, and devouring the classics beginning in 3rd grade. By high school I was finishing most the 'great american authors'. During HS french existentialists and the beatniks were perfect foundations for a too-smart-for-his-own-good arrogant teen. I am lucky to be alive. I dropped out of high school, but tricked my way into Harvard. Worked with Mandelbrot, was on the Sony PSX OS team, and quite a bit more. Primarily thanks to my exposure to multiple lifetimes of wisdom, generating inner confidence, thanks to reading. It's been quite entertaining, to say the least...

Re: Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

#120

Post by cm2012 »

dang wrote: post #102
bobcostas55 wrote: post #16

I liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." It's embarrassing to see HN users reflexively posting (and upvoting) five-second internet tropes to swipe something away. We need to avoid that if we're to have substantive conversation. Criticism is fine, but when criticizing, you owe it both to…

I usually love your moderation, dang, and agree with you 99.99% of the time. But I think the parent here's criticism of the article does add something - the idea of genetics as a powerful confounding variable. He could have expanded on it, but it didn't add nothing.
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