Term 1 Reader Profile Survey

This week I analysed the results of a reading survey on my Year 3 and Year 4 learners.  

The first key observation was the reading skills actually involved in completing the survey - many students needed assistance with reading the questions or needed an adult to ask them (interview style) the questions one-to-one.  I know I was ambitious trying to capture the viewpoint of my whole hub but I only ended up getting 55 out of 76 to do it. (And I'm not even going to mention the nightmare of discovering that when the students tried to do it on iPads they ended up editing someone else's as they were doing it at the same time!)

Students in my hub are a mixture of Year 4 students that were in my Year 3/4 hub last year, and Year 3 and Year 4 students who have moved up from the Year 2/3 hub.  I knew that they had different experiences with how Reading is delivered and taught at school.  I was surprised that 35% of students didn't like Reading at school.  I think this is a bit sad, and wonder what we as teachers can do to change their perceptions.

I was pleased to see that 71% of students are currently reading a book for enjoyment.  I did assume this may be higher -we regularly visit the school library regularly and have lots of opportunities where students silent read.  Do I assume the others just have a chapter book in their crate that they don't read or that they are not enjoying reading the book they currently have out from the library?

I was also pleased that 80% of students think that reading can make them smarter and help them to relax.  

I was a bit shocked in the number of students that had a card for the public library.  The Hornby public library is literally within our school zone and less than a 10 minute walk from our school.  During Covid times the "library bus" came to visit us (although a bit irregularly) and we got a lot of our students signed up with library cards at the time.  This cohort of students would possibly have not quite started school.  It is a real shame that such a free, community resource is not valued and utilised more by our families.  Does this also reflect on our student's parents as readers themselves?

The variety of types of books students enjoy reading was pretty much as I thought, and reflects perhaps what teachers read to their classes for our "Feed & Read" each day.  Common answers - chapter books, funny books, scary books and picture books.

Further results if you are interested are here:

So now what?

I am looking forward to diving deeper into what I can do as a teacher to change these survey results for the positive.  I have some ideas already (promote silent reading, book selling popular authors to really hook these kids into wanting to read certain titles, exploring the library to capture the interest in books other than chapter books or picture books).  I am more exciting to get into this professional learning and be able to share it with my wider team.