This summer, something from the millennial archive of the pre-cellphone, pre-social media era reentered the online zeitgeist: Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! challenge, one of the longest running corporate reading contests for kids, made a comeback of sorts when the pizza chain offered adults a chance to win a personal pan pizza if they brought in their old BOOK IT! pin—a one-day only offer. The nostalgia for this beloved childhood contest was so powerful that it inspired millennial book lovers to launch their own copycat challenges with their friends.
Public reading campaigns like BOOK IT! or the late country singer Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library have long been a part of the educational and cultural movement to revive students’ waning interest in reading, as books compete against social media videos and gaming. Now, it seems like school districts may have taken a page out of their book.
Districts have long run book drives and partnered with local libraries for story sessions and reading competitions. For the digital age, they’ve upgraded their efforts: The Providence district in Rhode Island hosts a game-show-style “book battle” every year where students from schools across the district compete in a quiz about characters from different books or record a “movie trailer” about their favorite stories.
A little over a thousand miles away, the Broward County School District runs a reading competition in partnership with the Florida Panthers, a professional ice hockey team from Miami, in which students from the top two winning schools receive shout-outs and prizes, while their parents (inevitably) receive special offers to buy Panthers merchandise.
“We’re in a landscape where reading is more effortful, so there have to be other kinds of value placed on [reading] for kids to see its worth,” said Amy Stornaiuolo, a professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “Reading takes a particular cognitive energy.”
National reading scores, already on the decline, cratered during and in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic. Data from a 2021 Pew Research Center report show that far fewer 9- and 13- year-olds read daily “for fun” than in 1984—incidentally, the year that Pizza Hut launched BOOK IT!.
Public campaigns can spark a love for reading, but usually involve external incentives like free pizza, discount coupons, or at least bragging rights to completing a certain number of books over a break. Inside schools, on a micro level, teachers have long used some of the same ideas.
But that only goes so far, researchers caution. When the motivation is completely external, research shows that a rewards-only strategy can backfire, said Stornaiuolo: “It can negatively impact children’s associations with reading, where reading becomes transactional. We don’t do it [for] pleasure. We only do it to get something from it.”
That’s why many districts’ new efforts don’t stop at campaigns with rewards. District leaders believe that winning competitions are only part of the puzzle: They’re supplemented by providing more access to books and improving parent engagement, which are the other pieces that can turn incentives into intrinsic habits.
It takes a village to invoke a love for reading
Many of the campaigns, like those in Providence and Broward County, contain a component of what behavioral scientists call “extrinsic motivation"—being motivated by rewards or sanctions. If things stop there, it could blunt efforts to develop an innate love for reading.
But if such incentives are part of a bigger plan, external motivation could gradually turn internal, Stronaiuolo said. They could connote a “cool cultural value” to reading: for instance, winning a book as a prize for completing a task, or a coupon for a new book at a scholastic fair when a student checks out and reads three books from a library.
Stornaiuolo calls it a self-nurturing loop, where kids are “reading to earn books, which then helps them read more, which helps them enjoy more. That generative loop can be very powerful.”
Educators and caregivers should pair incentives with pleasure. Research shows that paying attention to different kinds of pleasure—intellectual pleasure when you get through something hard, or immersive pleasure, when you get lost in a story world—can also make reading exciting for students. “That’s why we love sequels,” said Stornaiuolo.
Setting up these conditions can be hard for parents and caregivers who want to nurture a reading habit at home.
Parents can’t replace what teachers do in school to teach reading, but with a few intentional practices—such as asking follow-up questions about the books their kids are reading or building up a home library—they can make reading a part of the routine, said Kara Winerman, the director of operations at Turning the Page, a nonprofit literacy organization in Washington.
Turning the Page hosts community parent nights and “mobile meetings” where they meet families one-on-one in their homes or other locations, and brainstorm strategies to help kids who struggle with reading or are reluctant readers.
“We see the strengths that parents already have, and we position ourselves as their ally with right-time resources that don’t add immensely to their plate,” said Winerman. These resources also include strategies for students who suffer from attention-deficit disorder or for multilingual families in which parents may want their kids to read books in more than one language.
Winerman has tried to inculcate reading in routine family activities like cooking together. Parents can use cookbooks to boost their kids’ vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension while they read out recipes. And if families listen to audiobooks together, parents can follow that up with reading from the physical version of the book, so that kids can connect print to speech.
Turning the Page works with 11 schools in the city and leverages back-to-school nights or parent nights to get referrals. Winerman said she views her work as an accompaniment to the reading strategies teachers use in their classrooms, to take some of the pressure off educators by equipping parents.
That works best when the “principals and teachers are invested in connecting families to us, giving us information [on] what’s happening in the classrooms that would be beneficial for families to know. The strongest partnerships have the biggest outcomes,” said Winerman.
Parents also need to expand their idea of what constitutes “reading,” said Javier Montanez, the superintendent of the Providence, R.I., district. Audiobooks, magazine articles, newspapers, manga, and even cookbook recipes can be part of the reading list, if it engages students, he added.
How do reading campaigns measure success?
It’s difficult to measure the impact of these efforts in boosting how much young people read.
Turning the Page surveys parents about how confident they feel to help their kids develop a reading habit and uses them to gauge if their kids’ reading levels have improved, Winerman said.
Districts can take a more direct approach to connect reading campaigns with grade-level goals. The Broward County Public Schools district—which runs the Florida Panthers Reading Challenge in partnership with the ice hockey team—uses grade 3 reading proficiency as a rough benchmark for all of its in-school and non-school reading efforts. Since the campaigns are part of the overall reading strategy, though, it’s hard to separate out the effects of the campaigns on students’ reading scores.
Often, rather than academic measures, the benefits are measured in tangibles: Book logs, book nooks, and of course easy access to more books.
Montanez, from Rhode Island, has installed vending machines that dispense books free of cost at every school in the district. The family and community engagement office follows up free access with support and advice for parents: “Our primary focus with families is read everything with your students as much and as often [as you can] and have fun with it.”
One of the district’s strategies is to help parents create a “book nook” in the house where the student can read anything they choose without any disruptions. These nooks could be anything from a home library to reading under sheets with a torchlight, and the district recommends that parents set a time every day when the TVs and tablets are turned off.
Adults will often have to emulate the values they want to teach their kids. This means they must model reading every day, said Montanez.
Broward County’s Panthers Reading Challenge is built around the same principles of access and parent involvement. In recent years, the Panthers have run book drives at their games to stock Broward County’s “little libraries” around the county with books. The district also tries to ensure that every family has a library card and access to the books there, said Lori Canning, the director of family and community engagement at the district.
On the programming side, the Panthers Reading Challenge reminds families about the importance of reading together. Each participating family gets a book log to record how many books they’ve read together. Schools with the highest number of participating families get their own pep rally, and parents who help with this effort get access to discounted Panther’s merchandise.
These reading campaigns cultivate a reading habit in students, instead of teaching them how to read, Canning said. But the act of reading builds the skills students are explicitly taught in class.
“All the pieces come together when you’re reading aloud to a child. You get phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension,” said Canning. “Now, you certainly want them to eventually take the book from you and read back to you. It’s OK for the parents to be able to jump in and provide constructive feedback if needed.”
Olina Banerji is a reporter for Education Week who covers school leadership.