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Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

You should check out '30 million words'. It's a book about the importance of spoken language on young minds, and books may be a means. Fascinating data in it.

https://smile.amazon.com/Thirty-Million-Words-Building-Child...

Before I invest the time.and money in buying a book. How did they deal with the confounds? And was there a study on the intervention you could point me to?

Reading the summary of the book on Amazon, the experiments looked pretty confounded and it didn't mention any successful interventions.

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.

Yeah, I strongly believe that all books carry significant value. You don’t need high level concepts to gain value. We sometimes over focus on the best case scenrerio ignoring what we can get kids interested in.

In elementary school we would have assigned reading periods, during which we were supposed to read one chapter of the book we were on. Turns out that if you read five chapters instead you just fail all the quizzes because you don't have a fucking clue what happened in chapter 12, given you read that weeks ago and can't really tie chapters to events anyway.

That's true. I was reading a lot as a kid but I barely read anything we had to read for school. Reading assignments took the fun out of reading because now you had the pressure to be able to report on the reading.

To be fair, interpretation and writing are just as important as reading.

I strongly disagree. I think enjoyment of reading is vastly more important that interpretation and writing. What is the point of these kinds of assignments if it causes the kids to have negative associations with reading?

Even beyond school though, I find the idea that good novels require careful analysis antithetical to the concept of a good book. Good writing should be excellent at every level. It is wonderful if new narratives and ideas can be discovered upon careful analysis, but if that analysis is necessary for comprehension it ruins it for me. I believe that reading a story should be something natural and seamless.

They tend to try to make reading excruciating, particularly before high schools. I don't know if they still do this, but for some reason it was a big trend when I was in grade school to break up into "reading groups", and you'd go around in a circle reading a paragraph at a time out loud. I still despise reading aloud for that reason; I always got a rash of shit for being a few chapters ahead when my turn came up again and having to page back to find the right spot.

Reading aloud is something I've returned to in later years as speaking practice, vocal warmup, and testing my own writing. It was, of course, a chore in school.

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?

What I really hated in primary school was that when you finished your homework, you were allowed to read a book. However, all the books were pretty dated and not all that interesting. Furthermore, when you'd finished it, you'd have to write a report on it. One year, I got sick of this system, so I found one book I enjoyed and basically read that one a couple dozen times over the rest of the year.

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...

>> 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 aware, that's always been the case on my standardized tests, and I wasn't surprised because the questions seemed ludicrous to me (I nodded vigorously while reading [1]). I primarily read non-fiction and have wondered if I just don't grok fiction. What are other people's experience on that?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/...

I always found that the reading comprehension part of the test as the easiest by far, and would generally score at the highest level the test could predict.

We were explicitly taught to read the questions first, then scan for the question's keywords in the text, and pick the answer based on the best match for that sentence alone.

I agree; I typically finished a book a week just reading between classes in highschool (and more at night), and was one of the only ones who could fully read the passage and still have time to answer all the questions. They were weirdly analytical and overly-literal, not something that made any sense in a "comprehension" test.

I read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd ask you what color his shirt was.

Maybe that is reading comprehension and I am just bad at it, but to me shirt color was unimportant.

I can't imagine why just memorizing shirt colors would be worthwhile.

But if, for example, the author made it clear that the other kids were all wearing the same color shirt and the main character was not, you might infer something about their relationship from that--like maybe that the other kids all went to the same school, but the lead character went to a different school.

Details do matter for reading comprehension, because every detail is chosen. The real world is full of superfluous detail... writing, especially good writing, is not. Every word on the page represents a choice by the author--a choice to put that detail in, and to use that particular word instead of a different one.

And yet standardized test writers seem to think they understand those choices better than the authors themselves.

Critics have an opportunity to understand those choices better than the authors themselves because critics have the opportunity to look at the work from a different perspective.

Just because every bit of writing is a choice, that doesn't mean the author him- or herself fully understood why they made that choice. We're all shaped by our own life experiences, our family, the time in which we grew up, etc. Often, it's easier for a third party to connect those dots. That's why coaching and therapy works, for instance.

That said, when we're talking about standardized tests, they tend to (and should be) sticking to pretty well-understood and obvious examples of this sort of thing.

And of course, sometimes they're just not well done. Standardized test writers face the same challenges as every other writer, and I think we can guess that the very best writers probably do not end up in that job...

I'm sorry you completely lost me in the second paragraph. If reading comprehension comes anywhere near connecting an author's life experience to their word choice, then I'll gladly take my 0 and call the whole thing garbage. Sure, coaching and therapy work. They're also fields that churn out massive amounts of pseudo-science when it suits the author's ego.

If I do not understand why I write something, then some critic that cannot see into my mind is hardly going to make a better effort. Anything they said would be mostly speculation.

The color thing maybe is an indirect test to see if you're actually imagining the scene vividly, instead of thinking of it as some abstract "sledding" activity. It's not really memorization... Though literal imagining of things is something not everyone can do, so it also seems out of place on a reading comprehension test.

Personally I don't really appreciate any comprehension tests that can be answered somewhat easily by computers, which the "shirt color" thing could be. And tests that are hacked by simple human algorithms are boring. In elementary school I got really far ahead in extra credit reading packets by realizing I could skip the reading and just go straight to the questions, skim for the answer, repeat. Somehow I think that certain peers in high school never mastered this trick since they were complaining about lack of time on the ACT... The better test of comprehension was to read something and then write about it, but the writing section of the ACT was separated and made optional.

You aren't supposed to read the text and then answer the questions from memory.

You are supposed to look at the question and then find the answer in the text.

I read constantly when I was younger, mostly fiction. The first time I took one of those reading comprehension tests in grade 4 or something it said I was reading around a grade 12 level. I've also got a fairly high reading speed and retention level for fiction.

Non-fiction is different. I read slower and usually end up rereading sections a few times to fully understand them especially if I speed up and start skimming or something.

The thing is, I don't really read much fiction anymore. I find the stories all get kind of samey and findy self leaning towards technical books and non-fiction when I read now.

I do feel like comprehending fiction and non-fiction require two different skill sets in the brain. I've definitely been improving my comprehension of non-fiction stuff but I still don't feel like it's up there with fiction comprehension.

Poetry and stuff like that is something altogether different...i've never really been able to appreciate most poetry. I don't know why. I understand why it's impressive to be able to convey ideas through rythmic or patternised wording...I just don't really care that much.

I can offer these two data points: CA High SChool Exit Exam percentile: Reading: 99%, Spelling: 12%.

10 years later Im still of the opinion that if you deduced my intent, how i spelt everything really doesn't matter all that much.

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.

I think standardized tests are just not the way to measure reading comprehension, and questions like those in the article you linked are totally detached from reality. I personally managed to get by okay on them, but it seems pretty well understood that true comprehension - at least when it comes to fiction - is best gotten at in a more discussion based setting with more flexible interpretative possibilities.

I actually had a whole other experience being a really slow reader, and got taken out of other subjects to spend more time on it even though I scored "college level" on vocabulary. Always wondered if it's due to some mild dyslexia or something.

I started reading from a very young age, as a hobby & used to read any & every book available around me. So much that had been termed as bookworm by siblings or people around me.

At age of 28 I took IELTS test or International English Language Testing System, which has four modules Reading Writing Speaking Listening. I always scored full bands on Reading & I believe its because of all those years of me reading & loving enjoying the process of it. Reading module for me felt like always too easy & simple, whereas others used to dread it. Although at same time, I was terrible at explaining the same module to others that why I think x is the answer to y question.

I read a lot of hindi comic books & literally used to feel like watching a movie with all those sound effects of punches flights laughs etc instead of just reading.

We all can't be high brow, at times the VCR manual does the job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcMKWIuhBk

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