Kids read 25% more books in 2021-2022 thanks to TikTok
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Communities on websites like TikTok helped foster interest in reading, according to a What Kids Are Reading study.
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A table displays signs with #BookTok, at a Barnes & Noble in Scottsdale, Arizona. (AP)
According to a study, kids read more books last year than they did the year before, thanks to BookTok and other social media trends that encouraged kids to read.
In the What Kids Are Reading study of 2023, which polled kids in the UK and Ireland, students read 27,265,657 books in the 2021–2022 school year, marking a 24% increase over the previous year.
Researchers discovered that youngsters were more engaged with novels like Alice Oseman's well-known Heartstopper series thanks to social media trends like the BookTok community on TikTok.
Jeff Kinney, the author of The Wimpy Kid, and David Walliams continue to be the top two writers among students in primary schools, while Kinney, Walliams, and J.K. Rowling were the top three authors in secondary schools.
The investigation discovered that while the average book difficulty did increase as students aged, it did not do so proportionally to the pace at which the student's reading ability should have been developing.
Researchers discovered that students continued to read books at a level that was nearly identical to upper primary students throughout secondary school.
The research, which examined around 1.3 million students in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, was conducted by the learning and assessment company Renaissance and was examined by Prof. Keith Topping of the University of Dundee. “Over this long period, we have seen a repeated decline in reading comprehension from primary to secondary pupils," Topping added.
“To help tackle this, secondary pupils need to be encouraged to read books of increased difficulty, more appropriate to their age.”
The study discovered that all locations, including the Republic of Ireland, had a "striking slump" in book difficulty when students transferred to secondary school and that this trend often did not continue once students entered secondary school.
