John Cole: Well, good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole, and I'm the Director for the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress, which is the reading promotion arm.
We operate both at the Library of Congress with presentations
such as this one, but also nationally
through statewide affiliated Centers for the Book,
and they will be visiting the Library of Congress this coming week
for their annual idea exchange.
We also have reading promotion partners, more than 80 nonprofits
that work with us in promoting books, reading, literacy
and libraries, and we really count on our nonprofit literacy partners
to carry the ball on the literacy side of the activity
because our activity is largely, not entirely,
but mostly book and reading promotion.
Today, of course, is a special day because we're getting a look
at an important report that is causing quite a stir,
and we are quite lucky, really, to have Sunil Iyengar,
who is the research director of the report to tell us
about not only the report itself through a PowerPoint
that we finally have operating, but secondly I've asked him
to say something about the reaction
to the report from around the country.
Our program, as are all of the Center for the Book programs,
is being filmed for broadcast on the library's Web site and cybercast
on the Center for the Book's Web site as well,
and for that reason I ask you to please turn off things electronic.
We are going to have time for a brief question and answer period
after the presentation, and I hope that you will have questions,
but I need to tell you that if you do have a question that we will take
that as your permission to use both your image and your question as well
as Sunil's answer as part of our webcast.
In June 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts issued this report,
"Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America."
It was an assessment of what they saw as an overall decline
in reading in our country.
The report today that Sunil is going to be talking about is
in a sense a follow up but in another sense not,
and I know he will explain the difference, "To Read or Not To Read:
A Question of National Consequence."
This is a research report about the state of reading
that reached three startling conclusions --
and I'm taking this from Sunil and Dana Gioia's press release
about the report -- three startling conclusions
that are still being debated:
Americans are spending less time reading,
reading comprehension skills are eroding,
and these declines have serious civic, social, cultural
and economic implications.
Sunil is the -- well let me tell you what Mr. Gioia also said
in the preface about this, I think it helps set the stage
and then we will be able to plunge right into the report on the report.
Mr. Gioia describes the story told in this report, "To Read or Not
To Read," as the most complete and up-to-date report
of the nation's reading trends,
and he calls the conclusions simple, consistent and alarming.
He cites declines in reading among teenage and adult Americans
and among college graduates, but emphasizes
that these negative trends have more than literary importance;
they affect society as a whole.
He also explains that while it does incorporate some of the statistics
from this report, it contains much more data.
Sunil Iyengar also manages the National Evaluation Study
for the NEA's The Big Read project, and I hope we have a chance
to talk a little bit about Big Read.
He came to the NEA in 2006, and worked previously as a reporter,
an editor, and a senior editor for a series of news publications.
I also noted that you were, or perhaps still are, a board member
for The American Poetry & Literacy Project, which was founded
by Andrew Carroll and Joseph Brodsky,
who is a former Poet Laureate here,
and The American Poetry & Literacy Project is also one
of the 80 reading promotion partners for the Center for the Book,
so we have every reason in the world to be partners, but also to be able
to present you -- it's my pleasure to present,
to talk about the NEA report, Sunil Iyengar.
Let's give him a hand.
[applause] Sunil Iyengar: Thank you very much, John,
and I really can't think of a better place to discuss these findings
in a more engaging venue, because a lot of the great work the Center
of the Book has done has been very inspiring and uplifting to a lot
of the places I've spoken to.
So in other words, I feel not only as an ambassador to some degree
for the study results but indirectly, certainly,
in talking about these findings and the discussion
that will inevitably arise after this presentation,
I think hopefully I've been able to raise some awareness of some
of the great works that are done by other groups in Washington.
Certainly the Center for the Book,
the Library of Congress have been very important to our mission
of helping to restore literary reading
at The Center of American Culture.
[low audio] Well I'm going to -- as everyone was so patient in setting
up for this -- I'm going to flatter you, basically.
I'm going to reach my hand into the presenter's bag of tricks and pull
out maybe the cheapest act of flattery,
which is to say really I think you all, to some degree,
should be proud that you're here.   Let me explain what I mean.
First of all, this is probably your lunch hour, I can imagine,
people probably made special provisions to be here,
but I also wanted to say that in looking around the room
and understanding that this type of critical mass --
I know we don't have every seat filled --
but this type of critical mass is very hard to accomplish in topics
about reading and books and literature and, you know,
certainly one of the premises of this report, or certainly one
of the things it finds, is there has been to a degree a deterioration
of both civic engagement involved with literature and civic engagement
for its own sake in addition to the declines in reading
that I'll be talking about.
I think anything we discuss here is very important because it speaks
to the greater interests of those
who perhaps are not in this room as well.
The other thing I wanted to say is,
as John said about our previous report, and I will at the end
of this talk open it up for questions so I'll try to keep
on time given the time limits,
because for me that's the most enriching part of these discussions
and I think for the whole audience.
It's understanding some of the findings and talking about some
of the causes behind them.
But I did want to say that John had talked about the previous report,
the 2004 report "Reading at Risk," and that really was, for the NEA,
the clarion call in a broader sense certainly for those interested
in the reading of literature and access to reading in general.
We were -- as you know, at the NEA, among the many disciplines it funds,
artistic disciplines, we fund literature and we have programming
in literature, so you can understand why we would track
that item pretty carefully in a large survey we do every four years,
called The Survey of Public Arts Participation.
It's really the only survey of its kind,
the largest nationally representative survey
on arts participation, and we have questions
for reading and literature.
Literature there is circumscribed -- we basically define it as,
"Did you read, in the last year, a poem, a play,
short story, or a novel?"
And then we have a separate question asking how many books did they read
in the last year -- well, did you read a book
in the last year and if so how many?
That book, of course, can be general,
nonfiction explicitly included.
I want to be clear that those questions have a lot of resonance
because even though we're not getting at all types of reading
with those questions, we did notice that since 1982, the first year
of this analysis, all the way to 2002, the last study,
there had been significant declines among most groups of adults
and most age groups certainly,
and particularly steepest declines among young adults,
and this was an adult survey, so it's 18 to 24-year-olds,
particularly, and 18 to 34-year-olds.
As you probably know with "Reading at Risk," this caused a lot
of media coverage, discussions among librarians, educators,
policy people, and really the question that came to the NEA was,
"So what does this really mean for us, what can you say
about broader types of reading?"
Now, there are a variety of federal agencies and nonprofit groups
and academic institutions that are studying reading trends
in various ways.
We felt there hadn't been an omnibus report pulling in what we know
about reading of virtually any kind
with common definitions linking what the findings are and portraying them
in a narrative for the reader.
And so we worked at that soon after I came on board in June 2006,
and I'll just jump into the findings,
and I will of course welcome discussion afterward.
[low audio] So this is the report and what you have, probably,
is the executive summary, which is I think about 15 to 20 pages,
but the full report, just so you know,
is about 99 pages, exactly 99 pages.
So here we have some background about it.
Basically "To Read or Not to Read," as I said,
drew on large nationally representative studies
from a variety of sources: federal, academic, nonprofit
and industry sources,
and it contains the most recent statistical data we could get our
hands on.
A lot of this data had been reported in subsequent reports to "Reading
at Risk," but some of the data actually were buried in footnotes
and appendices where we really went after this primary source,
and often we contacted the survey methodologists and researchers
to grab that data if it was publicly accessible.
All types of reading was included.
This was not only books and literature -- an important point --
and for that matter it was not just print.
This is also inclusive of online reading.
It doesn't only include adults; this is children and teenagers.
So the three findings as John laid them out are that first,
Americans -- particularly children and young adults --
are spending less time reading.
Reading comprehension skills are eroding,
and these declines have serious civic, social, cultural
and economic implications.
Now those two -- B and C are really in a sense where we --
and also the fact that we looked at teenagers
and young adults, not just all adults.
You know, this is really in a sense a contribution
of pulling together voluntary reading on the one hand
with the data on reading skills
and putting them together in this report.
The first finding is that young adults are reading less books
in general.
This comes from our own data with the U.S. Census Bureau.
As I said we're involved in this large-scale study.
The next is actually being done this month, so it's very fortuitous
that I get to talk about this now.   The last one was done in 2002.
We're looking here at the percentage of young Americans
who read a book not required for work or school last year.
Now this "not required for work or school" is crucial;
we're not talking about mandatory reading either for homework
or work-assigned reading.
And here we're looking at adults in the 18
and up category -- 18 and any adults over.
Here we're specifically focusing on the younger adults, 18 to 44.
That's because for all three of these age groups,
we find sharp rates of decline between 1992 and 2002
in the percentage that read for pleasure in the last year.
If you look at the definition,
the way the questionnaire is implemented,
there's no specification about what type of book, what format,
what quality of book or what genre.
It's just purely, "Did you read a book in the last year?"
And so you do see that this is striking
because not only are these rates in themselves fairly sharp
and definitely significant, but also when you look at the declines,
18 to 24-year-olds in the first reading survey
in 1982 were actually the most likely --
had the highest rates of reading literature, for example,
than any other age group except maybe some of the very oldest.
That in itself is fairly significant because if you look
at the actual percentage, just over half, 52 percent,
of those reported affirmative to this
Reading is declining as an activity among teenagers.
This is from the Department of Education's data;
the National Center for Education Statistics is very good data source
for long-term trend analyses.
We looked at three age groups consistently: 9-year-olds,
13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds.
Here you have a roughly comparable time period as I just showed you:
1984 all the way to 2004.
This is the percentage who read almost every day for fun, okay?
So the percentage within these age groups
who report reading almost every day for fun.
And you see something really interesting in all three
of these latest time periods,
you see that consistently the percentages drop off when you look
at sheer percentages of reading every day for fun.
Nine-year-olds for all three years of the survey, well over half
of them were reading almost every day for fun versus all the way
down to 17-year-olds, 31 percent in 1984 and 35 percent
in 1984 for 13-year-olds.
What you also see is horizontally, what you see is the 13
and 17-year-olds, the two teen groups were actually declining
in a significantly statistical amount throughout 1984 and 2004.
So that by the end of testing in 2004,
one in three 13-year-olds were reading for pleasure every day
and only one in five 17-year olds.   So I just want to stress, you know,
one might say there's maybe something constitutionally different
about 9-year-olds, but then you do also see
that there are these declines
over time among those different age groups, not 9-year-olds.
College attendance no longer guarantees active reading habits.
This is actually some of the only longitudinal data we have
in the study that's been available.   This is UCLA.
They do a great freshmen trend survey.
They've been doing it for 40 years.   They interview high school seniors
and then they also interview those same students in whatever university
or colleges they go to before they become sophomores, basically.
So I want you to look at the height of this first bar.
Basically, it shows close to 50 percent --
47 percent of high school seniors in 2004 read very little
or nothing for pleasure, okay?
They followed these same students and by the time they were ready
to be sophomores this bar has jumped
and the true growth has actually occurred here in this light area,
which have read nothing at all per week, and this is reading anything
at all for pleasure during the week.
So again the bar has jumped and also particularly among those
who read nothing at all for pleasure, that's grown.
A similar finding with the same study,
they looked at high school seniors
and this time they followed them all the way
to graduation from their colleges.
Here again a very similar thing: close to 50 percent of them
when they're high school seniors claim to be reading little
if anything at all for pleasure,
and now that whole bar has jumped to well over 60 percent.
And the growth has occurred among those reading nothing for pleasure.
Teens and young adults spend less time reading
than those of other age groups.
Many of you might be familiar with --
the Department of Labor does these "time use" diary surveys
where they really try to pinpoint how do Americans
in aggregates spend their leisure time.
Again like all these studies it's nationally representative.
Here we see, in 2006, the most recent data we had available --
this is very true for the data
for all the years they've been doing this survey.
You see this constant pattern that 15 to 34-year-olds tend
to be reading the least amount in terms of sheer time
with the whole population surveyed.
They survey people 15 years and over only.
If you notice, the average American then
in that group reads 20 minutes per weekday on average,
26 minutes on weekends and holidays.
And 15 to 34-year-olds are the only age group to come beneath
that figure: seven to nine minutes on weekdays and 10 to 11 minutes
on weekends and holidays.
Does anyone know what takes up the most leisure time?
Audience: [Unintelligible].   Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, it's TV.
On-line activities, which people may think that aspect
of on-line is not reading, takes up a minuscule amount compared with TV,
which still takes about 2 1/2 hours
for all Americans including 15 to 34-year-olds.
However, it's also interesting, similar to what we found with our
"Reading at Risk" study that while 18
to 34-year-olds formerly had been the most likely to read literature
out of all age groups,
15 to 24-year-olds actually have the most leisure time at their disposal.
Here they are with the least percentage of it spent reading.
This is just another indicator: American families are spending less
on books than at any other time in the last two decades.
We found this data in the Consumer Expenditure Surveys database by,
again, the Department of Labor, but not many people were aware of it
so we actually brought it to the attention of many people,
including publishers around the time we were doing this study.
This is the average annual spending on books by household, basically,
so what I'm talking about here on the left side, 1985 --
again we're trying to keep the time periods comparable,
roughly 20 years -- here you notice
that the average household was spending about $33 for books
of any kind or purpose in that time.   This is all adjusted for inflation.
Over the next several years it certainly vacillated,
but it never got below $32 until the late '90s when it really sort
of tanked, and now in 2003 we were actually in the lowest point ever
within two decades of household spending on books, and we only seem
to be climbing out of that now.
Now I want to point out that we also looked at the possible effect
or relationship of used book sales or online purchases of these books,
and the studies we've seen show that we shouldn't be seeing this effect
if in fact the other side was going up as well.
In fact, there really shouldn't be a cannibalization effect,
and you should be seeing both going up at healthy rates
if in fact used book sales are prospering as well.
It's very hard to do any kind of publisher data because as many
of you know it's hard to track in terms of unit sales
versus what types of books are sold.
This whole industry, frankly, is a little disorganized in terms
of the ways a lot of this is reported; however, when we show this
to some publishers its very interesting because they told us
that in the same period, late '90s, they, too,
saw on their end a decline in units sold -- units of books sold --
and we're not talking about dollars because, again,
I don't think necessarily the price
of the book is the best indicator here.
So it's very interesting to see that.
And again, these are just indicators, but they all lead
to very similar conclusions.
A great number of books in the home are associated
with higher test scores.
Did I skip -- oh no, this is a good point because we actually, you know,
when we showed that to those publishers, for example,
and bookstore owners, we were expecting disappointment
and consternation, even perhaps like,
"I thought we were doing pretty well,"
since large book sellers tend to do pretty well.
But a lot of times it's not because of the sale of books.
There might be other items to compliment those sales.
As we all know, there's now coffee and a lot of other great things
like DVD equipment, things they can buy to supplement their sales.
But here, the good news for them is that greater numbers of books
in the homes is associated with higher test scores.
This is from the Department of Education data.
We did this for every single academic subject we could get
from the Department of Education.   They do the NAPE test.
Many of you might be familiar with the National Assessment of Progress.
The good thing about it is they also,
among many demographic variables they get at,
they asked how many books the students have in the home.
And we have various ranges here all the way from 0 to 100,
and this is true of -- I should say -- of every single test we studied
and for all the age groups not just grade twelve.
But here I'm showing that if you look at the scores
of these achievement tests, they basically rise or fall in relation
to the number of books that are in the home.
What's very important to stress here is we also controlled
for parental level of education, which is a close surrogate
for income -- it's the closest thing we could get to income
through the Department of Education data, and this inevitably held true.
So it seems that apparently if you come
from the lowest social economic background, if you have 26
or more books in the home, your kid is likely to do better
than a kid coming from a household that's maybe higher
in the social economic bracket
but still has only zero or 10 books in the home.
So this was something we found for all these tests.
So what is this?   Is it osmosis?
How is this somehow affecting the reader?
And I do feel, you know, we -- through a lot of other studies,
you know, clearly there's good evidence that modeling behavior
at an early age, reading in front of kids,
having books at your fingertips, you know,
ideally the kid will read the book themselves,
but it certainly instills a veneration
or at least respect for books.
And that might be something that's behind this.
After we put out the study, the Census Bureau actually put
out figures showing that less than half of all kids from birth
to five-years-old are read to by a parent or a family member.
So if you see that with books,
reading for pleasure correlates strongly with academic achievement.
Again, we adjusted for factors such as, you know,
parental level education, and we saw these, again,
a very sort of linear relationship between reading frequently
and not reading on the one hand,
and how well they performed on these tests.
Here we just show reading, but again,
we did this for various other tests.
So here, those who read almost every day are out-performing those
who read once or twice a month or never hardly ever.
We did this for writing, too, and this is important.
It'll come back later.
We see this, again, a very similar relationship with reading,
how often people read and how well they seem to write on these tests
that the Department of Education administers.
And, of course, a lot of teachers --
anecdotally people know that when people read more they tend
to be among the better writers.
Not always, but it often happens that way in classrooms.
The second major finding to refer to --
I want it to be thought of not in isolation, but now in relationship
to what we've just discussed --
reading comprehension skills are eroding.
In other words, as people are reading less,
reading skills seem to be deteriorating.
Reading scores for 17-year-olds are down.
Seventeen-year-old reading scores began a decline in 1992.
They're basically about flat right now,
but they started falling off a bit around then.
By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds --
remember that group I told you was reading for pleasure?
More than half of them are reading for pleasure every day?
They're actually at an all-time high in terms of reading scores.
And this test has been administered since 1971.
This test is a long-term trend analysis
that the Department of Education does.
This is the trend.
We see here the line going down, the black line, is the 17-year-olds.
This is the 9-year-olds.
And if you extend this line all the way back to 1971, the first year
of the test, you would find 17-year-olds are back
where they started, whereas
as I said the 9-year-olds are at an all-time high.
Reading proficiency rates are stagnate or declining in adults
of both genders and all education levels, so I hasten to add,
I'm not trying to gang up on a certain generation, or, you know,
just teenagers or young adults.
This seems to -- reading skills in general, as John mentioned
with our report "Reading at Risk,"
we found that for most adult age groups, we found declines over time.
So when we look at skills we find that also when you look
at different education levels, you see declines between readers
of the most recent period tested by the Department
of Education and those before.
If you look at adults in aggregate, you see roughly the scores are
about the same, but it gets interesting when you break it
down by education level and by gender.
I don't have a slide for this so let me tell you with gender,
we see maybe what's not surprising to people is that women
and girls tend to be reading much better than men on average.
They also read more for pleasure than men and boys; however,
the gap has actually widened between males and females.
It's not because the women and girls jumped ahead, but because the boys
and men have gotten further behind in terms of reading scores and for
Even among the most educated adults, reading skills are in decline.
Here I just mentioned the education findings.
Well, if you look at every single level of education here
with the Department of Education data,
you see that for the two test periods, 1992 and 2003 --
these data were reported just a couple of years ago --
you see that for all of them, there are declines across the board
with the average reading score.
These are comparable test scores in terms of we can make these analyses.
You also see that among bachelor degree holders and graduate school
or professional degree holders you see sharp rates of decline.
I'll also throw out that we --
you know, the Department of Education here is looking
at Prose Literacy, and they define proficiency as being able
to read a magazine or newspaper article,
like a USA Today Op-Ed piece, for example.
And they find that proficiency rates, the percentage
of people reading at the level, having the higher scores,
has actually declined the sharpest among the better educated adults.
It has declined for other groups as well,
but it is pretty striking that, you know, no one seems to be exempt
from these aggregate declines in reading.
The third finding, these declines have serious social, civic, cultural
and economic implications.
Kind of a mouth full, but it is sort of the "So what?"
of this report in a sense, because as I said, when we released "Reading
at Risk," a lot of people did ask us
"You're talking about literary reading.
What does that mean for me?   I can understand why the NEA,
programming literary events would be interested
in this, but why should I care?"
Well, clearly there are implications for all of us.
Employers now rank reading and writing as top deficiencies
in new hires, many employers survey of the same stripe,
saying the same kinds of things.
This is actually the conference board.
It's a very representative sample because they look
at pretty much every single industry sector, product
and service sector that's part of their large membership,
and they asked here -- here we're looking
at the skills rated very important by employers
for high school graduates coming into the work force,
but the results aren't that different
for college graduates coming into the work force.
Employers still found reading comprehension and writing to be
in the top three of the skills most in demand among new hires.
Yet these are the very skills that employers consistently cite are
in neglect, and that they find deficiencies
in new hires for these skills.
And reading and certainly written communications,
which is very highly stressed in a lot of these survey results,
seems to be pointing to, again, the centrality of reading
and writing even in an age that seems to be more about --
at least on the surface there's a lot of talk of course about,
you know, the need to keep up with improvements in technology globally.
This seems to be very front and center still to those improvements.
Good readers generally have more financially rewarding jobs.
More than 60 percent of proficient readers --
I just described to you that proficient category --
have jobs in management or in the business, financial, professional
and related sectors, and proficient readers are 2.5 times as likely
as basic readers to be earning $850 more dollars a week.
Now I kind of arbitrarily chose those professions
because those are the highest paying sectors, not that I want
to obviously make a judgment
on which jobs people should be going for; it's to show you
that in stark economic terms, that is what you see.
Less advanced readers report fewer opportunities for career growth.
This is coming from an interesting angle,
because it's not coming from the employers.
This is coming from employees, or rather the readers themselves
who had reported to the Department of Education the extent
to which their reading skills hindered their job prospects.
They were asked to comment on that in their survey and 4 percent
of the people who had scored on the proficient level reported
that that was a problem for them, versus 70 percent
of the below basic area, 38 percent of the basic category.
Deficient readers are more likely than skilled readers
to be unemployed or out of the work force.
The percentage of adults employed full-time or part-time is 78 percent
for the proficient readers.
Meanwhile, more than half of the below basic readers are
out of the work force, mostly unemployed.
Non-readers and deficient readers are less engaged
in cultural and civic life.
So we're moving away a little bit from the stark economic realities
and talking about sort of utilitarian terms.
Rather, what does this mean about reading and its engagement
in general with a lot of other positive behaviors in society?
I mean, basically, the percentage of people who read a work of literature
in the last year -- that was who we're talking about here --
40 percent of those people claim to have volunteered in the last year,
versus 16 percent of non-readers leaving this gap and --
again I can't stressed this enough.
This was one we controlled for every variable we could do --
well every variable we could with the survey data, including of course
as I've said many times, education,
which is a very close proxy for income.
And we found this to be the case consistently,
that those who said they read were also much more likely to participate
in a variety of civic and social activities including exercising,
going outdoors, hiking, camping, canoeing,
playing sports, attending sports.
In every case, it was two or greater times the level of those
Good readers make good citizens.   I'm emboldened to say that based
on at least the ingredients for citizenship.
We talk about the Department of Education data again
who independently sort of corroborated some of that,
because they did a study looking at their, you know,
those who had read -- how well people read rather
than how often they read, and they found very similar kinds
of findings.
They found that those who read on a proficient level,
57 percent of them had volunteered, versus 18 percent of those
in the below basic category.
Believe it or not, good readers vote at higher rates.
Maybe that's not surprising, maybe it is.
The percentage of adults who voted in the 2000 election,
the controversial one -- this is actually, the study was done in 2003
so they were referring to the last election.
Retrospectively, they asked if these people had voted, and 84 percent
of them in the proficient category of reading had,
versus only 62 percent and 53 percent for basic and below basic.
I just want to kind of -- before I open it up, I did wanted to kind
of reiterate in as clear terms as I can really what the study shows,
and I think it's pretty clear from the summary itself,
from the executive summary you've seen, is really --
we're talking in about aggregate figures here.
We're not saying there's in every case a cause and effect.
We can't show that without larger longitudinal studies,
but I can say that these strong positive correlations that seem
to be -- that definitely hold
up when we apply rigorous regression analyses to them,
that Americans are reading less,
and as they read less they're reading less well.
These Americans are at greater risk academically, professionally
and socially, and also by extension our nation is at risk.
And that gets back to what I said about the few, or relatively few,
who do engage and continue to engage,
we need to obviously widen the circle.
I feel like I might be preaching to the choir here,
certainly expanding the circle of literacy,
but also, active reading habits.
And I think for a long time the two have been thought
of almost in separate buckets.
I mean, certainly, when I go around, make the rounds,
talking about the findings the NEA came up with --
and this was about six months ago now the study has been out --
I'm sort of challenged to understand that basically there's a lot
of people who have been entrenched in very good literacy activities,
and then there's those who also
on another perspective are maybe writers, poets and publishers
who might have more of a reading for pleasure type end goal,
which obviously is aligned with other goals, but they're thought
of as almost two separate factors.   What I think we can show you --
some of the most compelling stuff that's here --
is really how inextricably the data seem to be linked with reading
for pleasure and reading skills, and that, I think, provides a platform
for further civic and social growth.
Now briefly -- I do want to leave time for questions --
I just want to say since I was asked how my experiences have been.
We were really flabbergasted, or I should say awestruck,
by the extent to which this report was taken up.
I mean, the day it came out --
coincidentally it came out the same day Kindle was launched,
so both received due coverage,
but our study has really obtained really national coverage
and conversation.
And wherever I go I usually, you know, I'll get very good questions,
and I've been trying to take note of those and really develop this
into something I can take back to the chairman and talk about,
further extending the conversation about what ingredients we need
to include if there is a follow-up survey in the future,
or what kinds of partners can be engaged with us on this issue.
One really distinct policy imperative that came out of this
on our end was with "Reading at Risk."
When that came out, the NEA, the Institute of Museum
and Library Services and our partner Arts Midwest got together,
and we came up with a program called The Big Read, which John mentioned.
Its been referred to as the largest literary initiative
since The American Works Project, and it really is.
It's going to be in about 400 communities at the end of this year,
towns and cities across the country, urban and rural.
And it's really based on the model of "One Book, One Community,"
where they choose a book off an ever-expanding list of authors.
And the grand key, usually a library or nonprofit group
or school district, is challenged to come
up with exciting arts programming.
We give them professionally produced materials to publicize the occasion
and to, you know, announce the project to people
and educational guides, too.
All this stuff is integrated into the community, and we're starting
to see a lot of great feedback from different generational groups,
different lines and districts in the city getting together and talking
about great books and good books.
So we're happy to have that initiative out there,
and I can tell you more about that if you'd like.
Thank you.
[applause] John Cole: We have time for questions, and I would just ask
that Sunil if you would repeat the questions,
we will have it all for the record.   Thank you.
Sunil Iyengar: Yes.
Sorry. Male Speaker: Two questions that may or may not be related.
First, what happens after age nine?
Second, you made an interesting comment that television seems to be,
or continues to be, a much greater distraction, if that's the word,
as opposed to the Internet.
I wonder if any of the data is specifically focused on the effect
of video games from television watching
or Internet use as a distraction?
Sunil Iyengar: Yes, so the question was basically --
it was a two-fold question.
One of them was to what extent do we look at video games, perhaps,
the effect of video games on reading habits, and you were intrigued
by the television, the amount of time spent.
Male Speaker: [Unintelligible] television or Internet.
Sunil Iyengar: Right and what was the other question?
I'm sorry.
Male Speaker: What happens after age nine?
Sunil Iyengar: Yes, and what happens after age nine?
Well, let me start with that one.   What happens after age nine?
Well, here we're venturing into the realm of educational psychology,
and you know, even cognitive psychology
and cognitive development, so we don't go too much out on a limb
and kind of extrapolate, really theorize about what's happening,
but we do point out that this gulf here,
when one considers how much more parental control there tends to be
for 9-year-olds versus 13-year-olds or 17-year-olds, it might speak
to the fact that, you know,
they have a much more regulated environment
at home in a lot of cases.
Regulate, what I mean by that is they don't necessarily have
as many leisure options at their disposal.
They can't just go out wherever they want and take
up time doing other things.
Schoolwork, there might be something to do with the workload,
the way reading is presented in the classroom.
Certainly I've heard very anecdotally from a lot
of middle school and high school teachers,
"I'll tell you what the problem is," they'll say, "it's this curriculum,"
or they'll point out to certain types of books that seem
to be off-putting or --
I can't really speak on that from their perspective,
but there's some academic/social climate difference
that I'm sure there are more sociologists better equipped to talk
about between 9-year-olds and 13 and 17.
But again, I want to stress that it's not just the gap
in reading that's occurring there.
It's that 13 and 17-year-olds have deteriorated in reading over time.
So if one did see this constant, I might just throw my arms up and say,
"Well, that's just going to happen," but clearly 13 and 17-year-olds seem
to be reading less as a whole.
The second thing, about video games, the only data I can think
of in this report is the Kaiser Family Foundation is a great study
of multi-tasking with media.
It does go into how much time Americans spend --
kids spend, for example -- on video games in relation
to other activities and even while doing other activities.
In fact, what's really striking is that 20 percent
of all time spent reading by middle school and high school students,
according to the study, is spent with some version
of electronic media, doing a non-reading activity.
So it might be watching TV.   It could be playing video games.
It could be text messaging while you're supposedly --
they claim they're reading.   So even in the amount of time --
the numbers we get of seven to nine minutes per day we have
to be a little suspect of, because some of that time is sliced
up further when you consider how much sustained attention is paid
to reading.
Yes. Male Speaker: You mentioned a decline in book sales.
Could that have been countered in any way by an increase
in borrowing books from libraries?
Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, you know that's a good question.
The question was, "Did the decline in book sales that we found,
in terms of consumer expenditures, could that be related to the --
I'm sorry, to the library data, more book borrowing?"
Well, you know, this is one drawback we have.
There really is no national data on book circulation.
We have -- you can go to individual libraries and get those numbers.
You can also get national data on circulation,
but you can't get book circulation -- or reading materials --
independently of the variety of other materials,
including electronic media and other things
that are circulated by libraries.
We don't have a comparable statistic to point to
or to see what's happening, but possibly.
Yes. Female Speaker: Were you looking at reading just
as the printed word on a page, like a book,
or were you considering audio books and also reading on computers,
literature, or whatever, blogs, and other reading on computer screens.
Sunil Iyengar: Okay, so all data have --
so the question was "Did you only look at reading in print
or did you include other forms of access to literature?"
So we -- the study has many, many sources, right,
so each one has its own definitions and methodologies,
but the thing that's consistent is all this is about reading
for pleasure, not for work or not for school, and it's reading.
So we didn't say in any of them about listening to books
on tape, so that's not included.
We do say -- some of the surveys say, "Did you read print or online?"
And the others -- the majority
of the other surveys except our own data, which I showed you,
say they don't exclude online reading.
In fact, I'll take that back.
Our own data, also, does not exclude online reading.
So none of the surveys explicitly exclude online reading,
and many specifically include online reading.
Yes Female Speaker: This certainly is a related question,
but you mentioned the Kindle coming out the same day, and that brought
to my mind [unintelligible] Kirschenbaum,
who has been somewhat critical of this study,
and who raises the question of the evolving definition
of what a book is, and I wonder, you know, has anybody looked
at any evolution in reading or literacy --
which your study uses less than reading --
to see if there are other skills developing to compensate.
And tonight, I'll go on record as a fan
of reading, in a traditional way.
Sunil Iyengar: Oh yeah, well, that's a good question,
"What skills might be compensating for the decline in reading,
particularly skills related to maybe computer use, or are derived
from computer use or some other forms of reading."
I'm happy to say I know Matthew Kirschenbaum, who you mentioned,
and he -- we met, and he very graciously invited me
to the University of Maryland, and I spoke there about this topic.
We had a very good discussion with his students and others.
I have to say that -- this is what I keep saying --
there's really no data to show what's being gained.
We just know what's being lost.
That's what concerns me a little bit.
It's definitely worthy of further academic discussion and debate,
but I do say at some point that we have to recognize
that we are forfeiting a great part
of not only our potentially our cultural heritage
by not reading these great works, or good works,
but we're also losing very important skill sets that seems to be still
in this day and age highly valued by employers, to name just one group.
So I do think we need more data to understand what other types
of literacies might be engendered apart from this.
Yes. Female Speaker: Is there any international context to this,
in terms of how other societies compare to literacy benchmarks?
Sunil Iyengar: Yes, so there's -- oh, so the question was,
"Are there international benchmarks
or international context for these findings?"
Particularly with literacy there is.
With leisure reading, the U.K. has done a similar study
where they find very similar things in erosion for reading for pleasure,
and other countries have too, like Canada, developed countries, mostly.
But in terms of literacy, we have some very good data there.
It's in the report as well.
There's a study called Pisa some of you might know,
and it looks at the G7 countries and the participating countries,
and the reading proficiency score for 15-year-olds
and that's the age they chose for some reason,
and they've benchmarked this year after year.
They're supposed to have this year the results for American students
in relation to other countries, but there was a misprint
in the test booklet so they threw out that whole sample so we have
to wait for another few years to see where we are.
But the most recent data show that we actually are smack in the middle.
There are 32 countries, and we are, like, No.
15 in terms of reading score.
We come beneath countries such as -- off the top of my head --
Sweden, Finland, a lot of other countries, Ireland,
and then at the bottom there's some others,
and we're right in the middle.
Female Speaker: Well, it sort of tracks the math
and science results, really.   Sunil Iyengar: And reading.
This was reading, this most recent one, but it also tracks --
Female Speaker: Well, I knew that the reading thing was thrown out.
Sunil Iyengar: That was the most recent one that was thrown out.
But actually they have the last one, which is still,
I think it was 2002 or 2003, showed that.
Female Speaker: Do you see any future optimistic response?
Or do you think this will continue to decline?
Do you have any personal reactions to why there's
such a deflation of pleasure in reading?
Sunil Iyengar: That's a generous question.
She's asking, "Do I have any personal reactions
to why there's a decline in reading or any optimism, what do you see?"
Well, I think, you know, the thing I keep coming back to --
I think what it really comes back
to is multi-tasking and doing many things.
I think that's one very central piece of all this
that I probably didn't even touch on, which is, you know,
the other night I took a cab, and the driver --
you know, I had an appointment on time,
you know sometimes you are a little impatient and you want the driver
to take you right away, traffic be damned and safety be damned --
well, I didn't want to go that far, but I did want him to step on it.
So he's driving, and he pulls out his cell phone --
okay you see that sometimes -- and he started talking,
but he put it on speaker phone and he made two
or three calls while I was going this relatively short distance.
He talked to his broker.   He checked his bank account.
He did a lot of things while he was driving me to my destination.
I would see that we would miss lights that I would have loved
to make and things like that.
I wasn't being judgmental about how he drove, but I felt like --
there's this common metaphor for everyone on the road trying to focus
on -- when we try to focus on reading we don't give it our all.
We get sidetracked with other things.
You know, there's a debate in how leisure time is spent.
Some people think with the technology we have we actually have
more time than ever.
A lot of people feel we have more time to do more work.
We spend time on blackberries.   We do other things.
When we have a second, we check an e-mail.
Are we spending time on relatively old-fashioned leisure activities,
such as reading?
Also a lot of these other civic and social activities I've mentioned
where you see young adults participating less.
They do participate less in all those things I've mentioned,
like all those physical activities, outdoor,
The optimism is that the flipside of this is at least here we have data
that show -- okay, forget about the fact that reading is in decline,
but we see how central it seems to be
to many various other positive outcomes.
I mean, no longer will people have a stereotype
of the past of isolated reader.
Clearly reading is central to, you know, a lot of positive social
and civic outcomes or seems to be closely linked.
There's curiosity that's awakened by reading, that empathy and skills
of powerful imagination and metaphor that are unlocked by reading,
which in fact, you know, cognitive psychologists have written
about very extensively about in the last few decades.
Do we have any time -- there's one more.
John Cole: We only have time for one or two more questions.
Sunil Iyengar: Yes.
Female Speaker: Is there any follow-up work being done to,
you know, interview groups to find out reasons why
or where do you go next [unintelligible]?
Sunil Iyengar: Well, yeah, this sort of took over --
oh, so the question is, "Where do we go next with the study?"
As a research office at the NEA, this really usurped a lot
of the work we've been doing -- [skip in audio] --
things to get at, more of the online types of reading
and other interactions with reading.
We had books on tape for a while, so we now have included other things,
too, and genres, types of reading,
so we can get a fuller picture of this.
The other thing is I've been trying to engage with people
who are concerned about this plight and trying
to bring together a round table or a small group at the NEA to talk
about future steps we could take as a consortium of people,
not just our agency, but perhaps members of the public
and other federal agencies.
John Cole: And you do know that the NEA is a reading promotion partner
for the Center for the Book, but one of my reactions to all of this is
"Gosh, the Center for the Book hasn't been doing so well.
I've got to stay with it another thirty years!
[laughter] And really try to make it work!"
But one other thought I have --
and I can say this because I'm a long time observer of the NEA
and a friend of the literature program for many years --
is that personally, I'm very pleased, of course,
with this attention to reading and reading promotion from the NEA.
The Center for the Book is -- on the reading promotion side,
we really work with the one book project through the state centers,
you know, for years and years and years.
The Big Read is one book with money and with the incentive and the power
that the chairman brings to taking an initiative,
which I think has long-term significance.
He also was able to bring the IMLS -- as you mentioned, Sunil --
in, so in a way during this period since the first study,
this has been a wonderful period for looking
at reading and reading problems.
Now the solutions, as I've hinted and you have, too, are still ahead
of us, and we're not sure what they are, but the attention is bound
to be and has been very helpful.
It's been helpful to joint endeavors between government agencies as well
as bringing in the private sector.
As an optimist, I can't help but feel that this boost,
this period of reading study
that the NEA has had is really a wonderful thing,
and I think that a lot will come from it.
I want to thank you one more time and say that I hope you can come up
and take a look at the Center for the Book
for a few minutes, and we can chat.
Let's conclude with another round of applause
for a wonderful presentation.
[applause] John Cole: And a very thoughtful, articulate speaker.