Dr. Anne McGill-Franzen and Dr. Richard Allington Participate in Summer Reading Loss Study

Dr. Anne McGill-Franzen and Dr. Richard Allington selected American Reading Company (ARC) to provide books for their Summer Slide replication study. McGill-Franzen and Allington's previous longitudinal study in Jacksonville, Florida, proved that giving students books they chose themselves virtually eliminated the summer slide.

"What we found was that providing self-selected books for summer reading produced as much or more reading growth as attending summer school!" said McGill-Franzen. "For the poorest children, the effect of our summer book distribution was twice as large as attending summer school."

Now McGill-Franzen and Allington seek to replicate those results, this time focusing on students in rural Tennessee. The challenge: With only two months left until the school year was over, how would they distribute the summer reading kits in time? To meet this challenge, they turned to American Reading Company.

When the ARC team learned that the vendor in the Jacksonville study had had trouble providing students with their first choice books, ARC pledged to ensure every child would get all of their first choices.

In this blind study, 557 students used a custom-built system to self-select 10 titles across 360 options, pulled from dozens of publishers.

"It was fascinating to see what the most popular books were. In the top 10 were 3 different Star Wars books!" Michelle Lynch, ARC Director of Curriculum & Instruction, said.

Each student received 100% of their first choices.

For the full list of top 10 books, visit http://www.americanreading.com/summer-reading

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