“Kids who are read to at home have better transitions to formal school settings,” said Molly Ness, GSE associate professor of childhood education, in a February 2019 Education Week article. The article examined two recent studies involving young learners, one of them about parents reading aloud to their children.
The Read Aloud study appeared in the seventh edition of Scholastic’s Kids & Family Reading Report: The Rise of Read-Aloud, and found that the number of parents reading aloud to their young children is significantly increasing. This is good news, because as Ness notes, when parents read aloud to children, “[t]hey have longer attention spans. There is some research showing that kids who are read to have better social skills.” She summarizes, “We’ve got decades of really clear research showing that it is so important to read aloud to kids every day at home.”
