A slightly longer run-up for this blog. I sometimes use a somewhat provocative example when discussing equal opportunities. Should we actually forbid parents from reading to their children in the evening?

Not because reading aloud is a bad thing, quite the opposite. But because we know it helps. And therefore, not every child benefits from it to the same extent. Those who have more books at home, more time, more language, and more support build an advantage. Reading aloud is not a problem in itself, but it can contribute to differences.

Of course, that is an absurd conclusion. You do not create equal opportunities by taking opportunities away, do you? But it does help to make an uncomfortable reality visible. Some good things are not automatically equalising. Dietrichson and colleagues already made this clear in their 2017 meta-analysis.

I was reminded of all this by a new study by Xie and colleagues, which examined reading enjoyment, socio-economic status, and reading achievement using PISA data from the United Kingdom.

The first results are not very surprising. Students with a higher socio-economic status perform better in reading. Students who enjoy reading more also perform better. Nothing new there.

But the interesting part lies in their combination. Reading enjoyment appears to strengthen the relationship between socio-economic status and reading achievement. In other words, students who already have an advantage seem to benefit just a bit more from their reading enjoyment than students who do not have that advantage. The classic Matthew effect: to those who have, more will be given. Let me be clear. The size of the effect made me hesitate for a moment about whether to blog about this, but the underlying mechanism is too interesting to ignore.

This should not be a reason to downplay the enjoyment of reading. On the contrary. It once again confirms how important motivation and interest can be for reading, alongside vocabulary, knowledge, technical reading skills, and so on. But it is a reason to be cautious with simple conclusions. “We just need to increase reading enjoyment” sounds appealing, but it clearly hides a more complex reality. Because if reading enjoyment is not equally distributed, and if its benefits are also uneven, then a well-intentioned focus on motivation can reinforce existing differences.

It is also interesting what the study does not find. Teacher job satisfaction does not seem to play a role in this story. It is not related to reading achievement, and it does not change the relationship between socio-economic status and performance. This runs counter to a commonly implicit idea that “happy teachers automatically lead to better-performing students.” It may happen, but it is clearly not a simple, linear relationship in this case.

As always, we need to be cautious. This is a cross-sectional study, so we cannot draw causal conclusions, remember PISA data. Moreover, the data come from a single country. And the effects, especially the interaction between reading enjoyment and socio-economic status, are small. But small does not mean unimportant, especially when effects accumulate over time and across large groups of students.

And so I return to an old point I keep insisting on. In education, it is always important to ask what works, for whom, and under what conditions, and what the possible side effects are. And those last ones can lead to difficult choices.