Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by cweagans » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

kirsebaer wrote: post #140

Insanity wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that last part is especially true. Due to school and forced reading assingments, reading gets associated too often with work or boring assignments.

School assignments should always be voluntary.

In a sense, they are. You'll just lose points for not doing the work. Clearly not what you were suggesting of course, but it's true.

Can you clarify how you think this would work?

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

#162

Post by resalisbury » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

Growing up in homes advantaged enough to have large libraries could indicate you are, in fact, advantaged!

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

#163

Post by resalisbury » Sat, Oct 20, 2018, 12:31 AM UTC

I could just say correlation != causation and move on.

...but I thought I would at least give it 5 minutes of googling.

Here's the first randomized controlled trial I could find testing whether access to libraries had any impact on literacy. TLDR (for this one study): access to libraries does not improve literacy.

"We conduct a randomized controlled trial of an Indian school library program. Overall, the program had no impact on students' scores on a language skills test administered after 16 months. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects larger than 0.053 and 0.037 standard deviations, based on the 95 and 90 percent confidence intervals. This finding is robust across individual competencies and subsets of the sample. The method of treatment, however, does seem to matter--physical libraries have no effect, while visiting librarians actually reduce test scores."

I will repeat the last line "visiting librarians actually reduce test scores." That seems counter intuitive. Maybe we should write articles w/ titles "LIBRARIES INCREASE ILLITERACY." That would be a dump article to write, but only slightly more dumb than the current article ;)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w18183

p.s. I like libraries.