The popular image of the modern, hands-on father might have to be scrapped. The idea that men are cutting back on work to help their partners with childcare is a myth, according to a provocative new book that presents stark evidence illustrating the British male’s reluctance to step back from his job.

One parent came because he could barely help his daughter with her 8th-grade homework. Another because math frightened her. And another because algebraic equations were as foreign as Chinese symbols.

In the cafeteria of Fall Mountain Regional High School earlier this year, parents and business owners met to learn about new math standards their students face.

During a series of sample problems, one woman joked that it would take her all night to solve one of the questions, a reasoning problem for 5th-graders.

Everyone laughed with her.

But why is it funny? Since when is it OK to be bad at math?

Those at the Fall Mountain gathering aren’t alone. Somewhere along the road, it’s become socially acceptable for Americans to admit their lack of math skills, shrug and chuckle about it.

Meanwhile, there’s a shortage of job applicants with the math wits to fill openings in certain industries. In New Hampshire, a 2010 survey of manufacturers found that more than 40 percent of employers said job applicants lacked basic math skills.

The U.S. routinely ranks below other developed countries on international indexes of math skills.

And roughly one in five adults in the U.S. lacks the math competence expected of a middle-schooler, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means they have trouble with tasks like doubling the measurements in recipes and calculating the savings on a 15 percent sale.

But perhaps the biggest challenge, teachers say, is that the way Americans view math can cause a self-fulfilling cycle for many students, where they don’t think they can achieve — and in many cases they don’t see the need to achieve — a deep mathematical understanding.

Experts say that’s a problem for which there’s no easy answer — but we should start by looking at ourselves.

Studies show that the number skills children develop at an early age follow a student through his or her education, and so even early experiences with math need to be positive ones.

Yet too few elementary school educators go into teaching for a love a math, said Beverly J. Ferrucci, mathematics professor at Keene State College. Some of those teachers may skip over a math lesson they’re not fond of, or spend an hour on reading while cramming math into a 30-minute lesson.

“They don’t see the beauty in math and so they can’t pass that on to their students,” she said.

When elementary teachers aren’t confident in their math skills, students pick up on that, Keene State sophomore Ryleigh Dimattei said. And then math becomes this scary, unapproachable thing. That’s the first part that needs to change if the goal is to get more students to like math, she said.

Dimattei just finished a geometry course Ferrucci teaches that aims to train math specialists for elementary schools, something that’s growing more common, Ferrucci said.

Teachers say whether kids enjoy math usually comes down to a pretty simple determination: If they can see how it relates to their world, they appreciate it, and if they’ve had success, then they like it.

Yet success in the subject is too narrowly defined by many teachers, parents and students, said Jesslyn Mullett, a math teacher at Marlborough School.

When all the emphasis is put on finding the right answer, messing up can be so intimidating for students that they’d rather not try to solve the problem at all, she said.

Instead, being good at math means being able to look at a situation, determine the problem, and come up with strategies to solve the problem based on what you have to work with.

If teachers and parents attributed students’ success to their hard work and attempts to find creative ways to solve problems, more students might feel successful, said Mullett, whose background is in psychology and statistics.

Just tweaking the language that we use around math can help change the way students look at and feel about the subject, she said.

Students’ attitudes toward math and their math achievement tend to reinforce each other, according to the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment of math skills in 4th- and 8th-graders. That means that students who feel good about math are the same students who tend to do well at the subject.

So Mullett starts off her classes by telling students that we’re all “math people.” We wouldn’t be able to function without an understanding of numbers, she said. We’d walk into walls, and we wouldn’t be able to make music, much less appreciate it.

“We’re all inherently mathematical because our minds inherently look for patterns,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not a math person because we all are. You just may not like math yet.”

Students in Mullett’s 7th-grade algebra class are learning how to balance and solve equations. She introduced the topic with physical items, Legos and building blocks, so students could actually see what a balanced equation looked like.

On Thursday, students broke into groups to use white boards and iPads to solve equations by using pictures and symbols.

They work at their own pace, and call over one of the teachers if they get stuck.

Mullett, Staci Willbarger, a paraprofessional, and Alex Gorokhov, a permanent substitute who co-teaches with Mullett, rotate among the groups, prompting the students to work through the problems step-by-step.

The hands-on activities help the teachers see exactly where the students struggle and where they have strengths, Mullett said.

She tries to give students things they can make meaning out of, math problems they can relate to their world. For example, the school is building garden beds, so math students have mapped out the landscaping using measuring and geometry skills.

The Common Core State Standards, a set of grade-level expectations adopted in New Hampshire and 44 other states, encourage more hands-on, project-based learning.

But by the time students reach high school, they are so conditioned to a more cut-and-dry mentality, where they only want to apply a memorized equation and calculate the answer, that there’s a lot of push-back from students on open-ended questions, said Bernadette M. Kuhn, a math teacher at Monadock Regional High School.

Most of the seven juniors and seniors in Kuhn’s algebra II class say they don’t dislike math, but they don’t think they’re good at it, either.

As teenagers, many students have spent years building up these walls and excuses for why they can’t do math. Eventually, that wall becomes more of a problem than their actual math skills, Kuhn said.

Senior Jared D. Stephenson said many students he knows don’t think they’ll need what they learn in math class when they graduate high school. So most of them, the 17-year-old included, only care about getting the grade they need to graduate.

But people eventually realize after they leave school that they need math for all kinds of jobs, said Virginia I. Herrick, manager of the Keene office of N.H. Employment Security.

Whether it’s working as a landscaper, a cashier or a machinist, basic math of some type shows up every day, and employers need new hires to be able to handle that, she said.

In New Hampshire, jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields, are expected to grow by 17.3 percent by 2020, compared with job growth of 10.4 percent for the state as a whole, according to an April report from the state’s Economic and Labor Market Information Bureau.

More locally, one of the biggest complaints in talking with manufacturing companies, which represent roughly 15 percent of the economy in Cheshire County, is weak math skills, said Susan B. Newcomer, workforce coordinator for the Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce.

In an effort to help combat that problem, some companies, such as Whelen Engineering in Charlestown, are starting to offer internships and to design curriculum for high school students.

Kuhn concedes that her students may not use exponential polynomials, the class’s current topic, when they leave high school. But as a math teacher, her goal is to help students build skills to logically think through a problem, she said.

Stephenson and his classmate, junior Wyatt A. Fabrinski, are skeptical, though. They don’t buy into the philosophy that math is more about learning effective strategies and reasoning than it is about finding the right answer.

“(Students) are in such a society now where if they don’t understand it immediately, they won’t give themselves the time to get it,” Kuhn said.

Ferrucci, the Keene State professor, lived in Singapore for two years during a sabbatical. The country consistently scores at the top of international math tests.

The U.S., on the other hand, ranked 11th in 4th-grade math achievement and ninth in 8th-grade math achievement in the 2011 Trends in Math and Sciences Study assessment.

People in Singapore look at math differently, Ferrucci said. They don’t allow their students to make excuses about why they can’t get it, and they see math as something everyone needs, something everyone can do.

That’s the message Keene State assistant professor Dick Jardine likes to send home with students in his applied mathematics, statistics and differential equations classes. Jardine, a runner, said he knows he could never run a marathon in two hours and 10 minutes, a nearly world-record pace. But if he trains, he knows he can finish one.

“It’s the same with math,” he said. “Everyone can do it at some level.”

Jardine thinks part of the solution to training a math-literate society is in improving the training available to aspiring math teachers. Students need teachers who are creative in their approach to tying math to real-world problems, and who don’t buy into the myth that some students are simply able to understand math, while others aren’t.

Winchester School District Superintendent James M. Lewis has another suggestion: Stop making excuses. Society is too forgiving in its math expectations, and that means adults and children alike are let off the hook too easily.

“Math can be difficult,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

By Kaitlin Mulhere

Source: The Keene Sentinel - http://goo.gl/7RZGR

The current depiction of tiger parenting is decidedly negative. Kim Wong Keltner’s book on “Tiger Babies Strike Back” and Su Yeong Kim’s report “Does Tiger Parenting Exist? Parenting Profiles of Chinese Americans and Adolescent Developmental Outcomes” suggest that strict Asian-style parenting produces an army of disengaged or emotionally stunted robots.

While I can’t speak for everyone, my own experience suggests that such upbringing also gives us the smarts to recognize our emotional and social deficiencies and to address them.

My parents are immigrants from Taiwan. I was an only child, and I was expected to excel academically and extracurricularly. So, I delivered. I got straight A’s. I played violin for hours. I did extra math, chemistry and physics problem sets under the eagle-eyed gaze of my mother.

Through it all, I cried and screamed. A lot. My mom yelled back. A lot. I told her I hated my life, my teachers, my school and all my activities. She yelled that I just had to get through it. Quitting was not an option. And of course she was right.

I owe everything I am and have accomplished to my parents. My family expected a lot from me only because they believed in me and wanted the best for me. They pushed me to excel because they valued me as an individual.

Tiger parents express their love through expectation of greatness, not in acceptance of mediocrity. Some people interpret such expectation as parental rejection of their worth as individuals. I always interpreted such crushing expectation as the ultimate belief in my self-worth. I knew that I was not being set up to fail.

My mother did not push me to excel because she prized my accomplishments more than my feelings. She listened to my feelings, but she also knew that my teenage feelings were volatile and irrational. She knew better than to let my future be derailed by such feelings.

My mother also knows that life has many obstacles, some external, many internal. She loved me too much to let me give up easily when confronted with those obstacles. For that I am eternally grateful.

I gained confidence and resilience from tackling my endless workload and from fighting through sleep deprivation. I knew that I was capable of getting through seemingly impossible situations. I knew that if I failed, then I just had to try harder. Failure is not a permanent state, but merely a temporary challenge that had to be tackled creatively.

The knock against tiger parenting style is that it does not foster emotional and social development.

Well, it partly comes down to expressing love and affection differently. Tiger parents may not often say “I love you,” but actions speak louder than words. My family never would have spent the time, money and effort—not to mention the emotional energy—on me if they did not love me. They never said this, of course. But I knew.

Sure, my mother viewed socializing with others as a waste of time. She wanted me to be valedictorian, not homecoming queen. I didn’t attend my homecoming. I was probably studying or working on my science project.

Now, I readily acknowledge that there is great value in socializing with others, and that my current social skills probably would be better if I had more time to hang out at the mall or at Denny’s.

But childhood hours are limited. Each child only has about 157,680 hours before he/she turns 18. The opportunity cost of being an accomplished child is that it takes away time from making friends and nurturing relationships.

For me, the tradeoff was worth it. There are skills that can only be learned in childhood. It is hard for a student to catch up academically if she is significantly behind in high school. But someone can become more self-aware, work on social skills and learn negotiating tactics later in life.

Without the skills and expertise that is a result of excelling, I would never have the chance to sit at the important tables to participate in the discussions, no matter how great my social skills.

I value my tiger cub upbringing mostly for the tools it gives me to make a difference in my community. I know plenty of grown up tiger cubs who tutor at-risk youth, advocate for the disadvantaged, and generally strive to improve the world. Our childhood accomplishments enable us to meaningfully contribute to our communities.

And isn’t that where self-awareness and proper socialization lead us all?

Editor’s note: Grace Liu, a former corporate attorney, is a research officer at California State University, Fresno. She is the vice president of the Central California Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

By Grace Liu

Source: CNN International - http://goo.gl/JUk9n

This statement has surprised some of my colleagues and is at odds with much of the conventional wisdom about modern parents — that we are over-protective or overly -ndulgent, too ready to be our child’s friend rather than an authority, and too afraid to say, “No.”

Research findings from many studies, however, provide ample evidence to support my personal experience. Although it is at times difficult to distinguish cause and effect, clinical research consistently finds high levels of criticism (and fewer positive statements) in the interactions of parents and troubled children. A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, for example, found that criticism by mothers was a significant risk factor for depression in children.

Persistent criticism breeds resentment and defiance, and undermines a child’s initiative, self-confidence and sense of purpose. We need to prevent the buildup of these unhealthy attitudes in the minds of our children.

It seems necessary to ask, “Why are we so often critical of our children?” We all know, from our own lives, how criticism feels. We may have experienced the demoralizing effect of frequent criticism in the workplace; or we may have suffered the eroding effect of frequent criticism on satisfaction in our love relationships. It is surprising, then, how often we fail to consider this in relation to our children.

Much of our criticism is well-intentioned, motivated by a desire for our children to improve, and eventually succeed, in a competitive world. In these instances, we criticize because we are anxious about our child’s future. We regard our criticism as constructive, or not as criticism at all, but rather as instruction or advice.

Many parents feel justified in their criticism when they make an effort to balance criticism with praise. Because they are willing to offer praise for their child’s good behavior, these parents do not regard themselves as critical. Other parents are aware of their criticalness. They believe that it is their “right and responsibility” to be critical of their children, in order to prepare them for the demands and responsibilities they will face as adults. In giving their criticism, these parents believe that they are doing the right thing. They therefore continue to criticize, despite its bad effects.

From this perspective (shared by some of my colleagues) a child’s defiance or withdrawal, or his unwillingness to communicate, especially in adolescence, is an unavoidable consequence of responsible parenting.

I disagree.

Of course, we need to let children know of our disapproval, and all children can be expected to respond with some form of protest when limits are set. Persistent criticism, however, is destructive, often deeply destructive, to our relationships with our children, and a “balance,” or equal ratio, of praise and criticism has been shown to be unhealthy, both in marriage and in parent-child relationships. When frequent criticism persists, all other efforts to improve our family relationships are likely to fail.

Too much criticism and instruction can also take the fun out of activities that children and adolescents would otherwise enjoy. Ask Andre Agassi. Agassi’s tennis instruction, described in his autobiography, Open, was, by any standard, extreme. When he was 7 years old, Andre hit 2,500 tennis balls a day. He became a great player, but he hated tennis.

Sometimes, we do not realize how hurtful our words have been. When children respond poorly to criticism, with defensiveness or withdrawal, parents may say, “He is too sensitive.” Perhaps. But we are all sensitive to criticism. And he may not be overly-sensitive; rather, we may have been too critical and not sensitive enough.

There are also deeper causes of persistent criticism, causes rooted in our character and life circumstances — how well we are able to cope with painful feelings in our own lives and how burdened we feel by the demands of raising our children. In my therapeutic work, I have found that parents who are critical of their children are often critical of each other, and less able to repair conflicts in their marriage and their work relationships.

Often, however, we simply don’t know another way. In next week’s post, I will offer solutions – alternatives and antidotes to this common family problem.

By Kenneth Barish, Ph.D., Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University

Source: Huffington Post - http://goo.gl/d52pi

But can American parents learn something from their counterparts in different parts of the world?

The answer is yes, according to Christine Gross-Loh, author of the recently published book “Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us.” The Harvard-educated mother of four traveled to and researched parenting styles in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan, China, Italy and other countries.

American parents may not think they need any lessons. According to a study released in March by the Pew Research Center, moms and dads in the U.S. gave themselves good marks for how they raised their children. Almost 70 percent of parents with children under 18 said they have done a very good job or better. Only 6 percent rated themselves poorly.

In other parts of the world, American parenting styles stand out. When Gross-Loh and her husband were raising their four children in Japan, she noticed something unusual when they were playing in the park.

“I was the only parent following my children around the park and preventing disputes,” she said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour.

Japanese parents allowed their children to get into scrapes, she said, and felt that disagreements were character-building.

“Even though we in America prize independence and autonomy and freedom so much, children in Japan were being raised with a lot more of these qualities,” said Gross-Loh.

Without a doubt, good parenting means being involved in children’s lives. But Gross-Loh’s research led her to conclude that being over-involved is detrimental and undermining.

“We like children who can speak their own minds and give their own opinions and be their own person,” she said. “This is a part of being independent. But there’s a whole other part that I think we’ve been neglecting and that’s the idea of self-reliance and self-responsibility. Those are the sorts of ideas that I see being fostered in other countries that are not being fostered as well by many parents in the U.S. It’s not our fault. We’ve been told that it’s good to look out for our children and help them out.”

One facet in developing independent children seemed counterintuitive: co-sleeping. Gross-Loh pointed to a survey showing that out of 100 countries, the U.S. was the only one in which parents provided a separate sleeping place for their children. In other countries, when little children sleep in the same bed, the same room or nearby the parents, their levels of dependence better matched during day and night.

“The idea is that when you allow children to be dependent in this way when they are babies, then they can more easily move into age-appropriate independence as they get older,” said Gross-Loh. “And research does show that even American children who were co-sleeping with their parents were more independent in different ways.

“Parents who have this 24-hour relationship with their kids, in Japan, for example, were not as reluctant to ask more of their children during the daytime,” Gross-Loh added. “They could carry their own bags, walk to school on their own, do chores around the house. In the U.S., we have this tendency to think there are things they can’t handle during the day, but we ask them to do something different at night.”

Another aspect of self-reliance and independence is safety. But Gross-Loh argued that allowing children to take some risks is actually the best sort of protection to give them, something she saw in Japan and certain European countries.

“That is how they will form the judgments to deal with all sorts of situations,” she said.

Gross-Loh recounted visiting a kindergarten in the German forest and coming across a 5-year-old child whittling on a stick with a knife.

“He had been taught how to do it safely,” she said. “Meanwhile, a lot of children in the U.S. are not even allowed to pick up a stick at the school playground because it might hurt someone.”

Through raising her children abroad and her research, Gross-Loh said she has learned her own lessons for her family.

“For me, I learned that I could be more relaxed about parenting because there’s so many ways to be a good parent,” she said. “And a lot of them involve a lot less involvement than we believe we should be doing.”

But what about lessons that American parents can teach the rest of the world?

“One of the things that was really striking is that we strive to raise tolerant children,” said Gross-Loh. “In a way, it’s necessitated because we live in such a diverse society. But it’s the sort of thing I didn’t see in other cultures.”

By Christiane Amanpour, Mary-Rose Abraham, David Miller & Brian Fudge

Source: Yahoo! Music - http://goo.gl/35gVd

You’re baby is through with kindergarten and that means a few things. For example, he’s probably a little more embarrassed about mommy kisses in front of his friends, he actually has an opinion about what he wears, and, it’s graduation time!

For most kids, kindergarten is pretty major. After all, it’s the first time they spend an entire day at school sans nap, and at most schools, the program is a little less playful and a little more educational. However, does the end of kindergarten really require a graduation?

It’s one thing to congratulate our little ones for their milestones, but do we need a public ceremony to do it? We asked some moms from around the country for their opinions about kindergarten graduation and we’ll admit, we were a little surprised that they all seemed to say the same thing…

Pennsylvania mom of three Jessica Pollner, whose daughter will be graduating kindergarten in a few weeks, told us, “My daughter has been practicing for her kindergarten graduation for weeks. She’s super excited and proud to be going to first grade. She’s been at the same school since she was 3-months-old though, [and she] will start public school in first grade so for us it’s a really big deal.”

In Portland, Maine, Sarah Greven, who has a 5-year-old daughter, said that when she was little, her younger sister had a graduation, but she didn’t and has always felt a little snubbed. “Even at age 9, I was jealous and saw the value in it. Kindergarten graduation is the cutest thing ever. A whole year of school under your belt at 5 is a big accomplishment! I can’t wait [for my daughter’s].”

“This study is one of the first to raise the question: Is the content that teachers report teaching in kindergarten meeting the needs of the majority of their students?” Mimi Engel, assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College and lead author of the study, said.

“We looked at the data [from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort or ECLS-K], immersed ourselves in the literature, and we saw that it’s been well-documented that the vast majority of kids can count once they start kindergarten,” she continued. “About 95 percent of kids have mastered basic number skills — the numbers one through 10 — both the language of counting and one-to-one correspondence. We also noticed that teachers spend a lot of time on these basic skills.“

Engel and her collaborators reported their findings in November online in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

The study showed that the vast majority of students had mastered basic counting and shapes by the fall of kindergarten. In contrast, very few had mastered simple addition and subtraction.

Yet teachers reported spending the most classroom time — typically 13 days per month — on the skills the students had already mastered.

Devoting additional days per month to basic counting and shapes was negatively associated with end-of-kindergarten mathematics test scores. However, more time spent on teaching higher-level mathematics, such as place value, currency, ordinality, and addition and subtraction, was associated with an increase in math test scores at the end of kindergarten.

The findings showed that a large portion of the mathematics content taught during kindergarten may not meet the needs of many kindergarteners and that closer attention to children’s knowledge and skills at school entry may be warranted. In fact, the increases shown by spending more time on more advanced math topics suggest that a relatively modest shift in classroom coverage would lead to small gains in mathematics achievement.

“This study doesn’t help us get at why this [misalignment] occurred,” Engel said. “However, there’s another round soon to be released of the ECLS-K called the K:2011 that follows children who were in kindergarten in 2010-11. We’re dying to get our hands on that data to see if policies like No Child Left Behind shifted content in the classroom.”

Data from the ECLS-K was gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics to give a snapshot of what kindergarten looked like in 1998-99 for about 21,000 children nationally. These children were then followed through eighth grade. The data is rich in descriptive information on the children’s status at entry to school, their transition into school and their progression through eighth grade. The longitudinal nature of the ECLS-K data enables researchers to study how a wide ranfge of family, school, community and individual factors are associated with school performance.

Engel’s research uses the ECLS-K, other large-scale national databases and quantitative and qualitative means to investigate topics in education policy. The current research grew out of prior work on the effects of early academic achievement on later academic outcomes.

“Getting into it more from a policy perspective, there’s a structure around reading and a huge knowledge base around early reading. But it’s not clear that there’s as much emphasis or knowledge around math in early elementary classrooms, though there is research being done to support more structure.”

Engel collaborated on the study with Amy Claessens, assistant professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, and Maida A. Finch, PhD’12, assistant professor in the Department of Education Specialties at Salisbury University.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant #5R24HD051152- 07, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, the University of Chicago Population Research Center and Vanderbilt University.

Source: Science Daily - http://goo.gl/Y1MXe

Researchers who experimented with a type of brain stimulation called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) found that in less than a week it improved students’ performance in both calculation and rote learning of mathematical tasks.

The researchers stressed this was a small, early-stage study with more research required, but said the technique may one day help people with learning problems or neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. It could also help people reach their full potential in math and other tricky subjects.

The experiment involved 51 students from Oxford who were asked to perform two arithmetic tasks testing their calculation and rote learning abilities over a five-day period. Around half the volunteers were given TRNS while performing the tasks each day.

“With just five days of cognitive training and non-invasive, painless brain stimulation, we were able to bring about long-lasting improvements in cognitive and brain functions,” said Roi Cohen Kadosh of Britain’s Oxford University, who led the study.

The improved performance was maintained for six months after the stimulation and training, he said.

TRNS applies random electrical noise to targeted regions of the cortex – a part of the brain important for memory and attention – through stimulation electrodes placed on the surface of the scalp. It is non-invasive, painless and relatively cheap.

Publishing his findings in the journal Current Biology, Cohen Kadosh said it was not entirely clear how the stimulation works, but evidence suggests it helps the brain work more efficiently by making neurons fire more synchronously.

Cohen Kadosh and colleagues have published previous studies showing how other forms of brain stimulation can make people better at learning and processing numbers.

“Math is a highly complex cognitive faculty that is based on a myriad of different abilities,” Cohen Kadosh said. “If we can enhance mathematics… there is a good chance that we will be able to enhance simpler cognitive functions.”

The researcher said that if future experiments with TRNS continue to show positive results, the technique could be used in clinics, classrooms, and even at home to help people who struggle with particular cognitive tasks.

“This could include anyone from a child falling behind in … maths class to an elderly patient suffering from neurodegenerative disease,” he said.

By Kate Kelland

Source: Solar News - http://goo.gl/8ktIv

- Survey of 35,000 pupils finds majority of youngsters now read on screen

- ebooks also reducing the number of children who enjoy reading as a pastime 

- “Children who only read on-screen are significantly less likely to enjoy reading and less likely to be strong readers”, National Literacy Trust says

Children who read on an iPad or Kindle are falling behind in the classroom as figures showed for the first time the majority of youngsters now prefer ebooks to printed versions.

The advance of technology means that young people who read on a screen have weaker literacy skills and fewer children now enjoy reading, experts have said.

A survey, conducted by The National Literacy Trust, found that 52 per cent of children preferred to read on an electronic device – including e-readers, computers and smartphones – while only 32 per cent said they would rather read a physical book. 

Worryingly, only 12 per cent of those who read using new technology said they really enjoyed reading, compared with 51 per cent of those who favoured books.

Pupils who get free school meals, generally a sign they are from poorer backgrounds, are the least likely group to pick up a traditional book, the research found.

The poll of 34,910 young people aged between eight and 16 across the UK found that those who read printed texts were almost twice as likely to have above-average reading skills as those who read on screens every day. 

The study also found that children were more likely to have their own computer than their own desk.

Jonathan Douglas, the director of the National Literacy Trust, said: ‘While we welcome the positive impact which technology has on bringing further reading opportunities to young people, it’s crucial that reading in print is not cast aside.

‘We are concerned by our finding that children who only read on-screen are significantly less likely to enjoy reading and less likely to be strong readers.

‘Good reading skills and reading for pleasure are closely linked to children’s success at school and beyond. We need to encourage children to become avid readers, whatever format they choose.’

Award winning author Joan Brady is one of several literary stars to say the rise of the ebook is a ‘problem’ for Britain’s children.

Boys in particular would prefer to read on a computer screen and the change in trend has encouraged many publishers to cash in by offering electronic versions of comics and books.

The number of children and young people reading newspapers has fallen from 46.8 per cent in 2005 to 31.2 per cent in 2012.

By Martin Robinson

Source: Daily Mail - http://goo.gl/30u1B