Hooked on Books

You know that feeling when you’re reading a good book and you get so lost in the story that you forget everything else going on around you? 

It’s known in the academic world as “story world absorption,” and for years, researchers have studied why readers get hooked on certain narratives. Unfortunately, though, research has focused primarily on adults, despite our knowing how important reading is for kids and young people. 

That changed this past summer when doctoral student MG Prezioso, Ed.M.’17, and Professor Paul Harris released results from their new study, published in the journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, that looks at what’s happening when children ages 9–11 become absorbed in what they are reading. The duo was motivated, in part, by something they noticed: Kids with different levels of reading interest were completely immersed in and equally excited about a particular book series: Harry Potter. 

Was it just this popular series, they wondered, or something else? 

In an effort to find out, Prezioso and Harris asked children to fill out surveys about their reading habits and did follow-up interviews. They looked at reading frequency, favorite books, whether kids were more interested in fiction versus nonfiction, and the importance of character, plot, and descriptive language. What they found was that for the youngest in their survey, the 9-year-olds, frequent readers reported greater overall absorption than 9-year-old occasional readers, but 10- and 11-year-old readers reported similar levels of absorption, regardless of how often they read. 

“For that age range, it says that how often you read has no bearing on how you experience absorption,” Prezioso says. “Whether you’re an avid reader or you’re an infrequent reader, every kid has the potential to be absorbed and immersed in a story in a book, and kids reported experiencing absorption in very similar ways.” She says that while current educational research tends to emphasize the importance of perseverance or grit when it comes to becoming readers, what was more important, they found, is that when children are really into what they're reading, it’s the story — like Harry Potter — that’s keeping them hooked.

“When kids are absorbed in a text, they’re not galvanized primarily by specific personality traits; they're motivated by the desire to find out what happens in the text itself,” says Prezioso. “Every single kid that I interviewed mentioned fast-paced plots in fiction or in nonfiction, and text needs to be written in a narrative way. An informational story about a historical event, like the sinking of the Titanic, can be really engaging if it’s told as a story, with a mystery component to the plot.”

Prezioso says her interest in doing this research, and possibly expanding it to other age groups, is to better understand reading motivation in school, which is often focused on skill building, and out of school, where kids typically read “for fun.”

“I was interested in that disparity, in trying to gather data on how kids experience absorption, the kinds of books that are engendering this sort of experience, and maybe how it could be used to inform classroom practice and education spaces,” she says. “Ultimately, you want kids to be lifelong readers. You want kids to be acquainted with the joys that make reading, literature, poetry, and nonfiction worthwhile. It’s a lifelong relationship and absorption is a piece of that.”