Schools Matter: Those who read more (fiction), know more.

Schools Matter: Those who read more (fiction), know more.:

Those who read more (fiction), know more.

by skrashen

Those who read more (fiction), know more. 
Stephen Krashen

The recent insistence that English Language Arts standards include more nonfiction and less fiction is based on the assumption that nonfiction reading will better prepare students for the rigors of the real world. There are no studies I know of that compare fiction and nonfiction reading in terms of knowledge development, but a number of studies done by Stanovich and his colleagues show that those who read more fiction know more about a variety of subjects. 

“Reading” in these studies included a great deal of fiction reading. Stanovich and his colleagues used the Author Recognition Test (ART) in several of these studies, a measure in which subjects indicated which authors’ names they recognized (West and Stanovich, 1991; Stanovich and Cunningham, 1992, 1993; West, Stanovich and Mitchell, 1993). The ART was “dominated by ‘popular authors’ as opposed to ‘highbrow’ writers who would be known by only the most academically inclined readers” (Stanovich and Cunningham, 1993, p. 213). Although the ART included different genres, most of the authors were fiction writers (e.g. 36 out of 40 in Stanovich and