"In adolescence, homework was found to take up 0.5 hr per day among U.S. 12- to 17-year-olds (Leone & Richards, 1989; Timmer et al., 1985), 1.2 hr per day among French Swiss (Grob et al., 1993) and Germans (Oswald & Uwe Suess, 1990), 2.5 hr per day for samples of Polish, Romanian, and Russian adolescents (Alsaker & Flammer, 1999; Zuzanek, 1980), and 3.0 hr per day among Korean high school students (Lee, 1994). For the Japanese, these estimates are 2.2 hr per day for junior high and 2.5 hr for high school students (NHK Public Opinion Research Division, 1991). The highest rates appear to be in Taiwan, where llth graders report spending an average of 3.7 hr per day on homework (Fuligni & Stevenson, 1995), and among middle-class Indian high school students, who report spending 4-5 hr per day (S. Verma & Gupta, 1990)." - Larson, R W, and S Verma. “How Children and Adolescents Spend Time Across the World: Work, Play, and Developmental Opportunities.” Psychological Bulletin 125.6 (1999) : 701-736.When talking about reading habits and their always mentioned decline on the entire human population, we might need to stop a second to look to some numbers about what other activities compete for the teen's non-schoolwork leisure time. The above comparation makes us ponder: We as publishers are competing against mass media for every second a child decides freely to read a book instead of Facebook. Not to mention, there is always mom yelling to turn down the music or take out the trash, ha.
I'll get into reading for pleasure next. I've got some interesting highlights on the topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment