Bibliographic record
Abstract
A nationwide survey of the voluntary reading interests and habits of Jamaican children was undertaken to discover the specific reading interests of 6th graders relative to the known reading interests of their peers in North America and the United Kingdom. A random sample of 418 6th graders attending public schools was selected and stratified according to gender and geography. Overall, the children showed a wide range of reading interests in both fiction and nonfiction categories. Gender played a large role in book choices, but the Jamaican boys defied the norm and gave a high ranking to Love Stories. Geography, although to a lesser degree, also played a role in the children's book choices. Introduction Reading is considered to be an essential foundation for learning, and the development of a lifelong reading habit is seen as a gateway to enjoyment and personal enrichment. Consequently, librarians and educators devote much of their time and energy to finding ways to encourage children to read. Recognizing that interest plays an important role in motivating children to read, these professionals have conducted many studies to discover children's reading interests in order to develop guidelines for literature selection and use for curricular and recreational purposes. Most of the research emanates from developed societies, and so emergent nations like Jamaica rely heavily on these findings for guidance in collection development in youth libraries. Although this practice may be rationalized on the basis of the seeming universality of children's reading interests irrespective of geographic location (Schlager, 1978), it was felt that existing cultural and social differences between developed and developing societies were likely to affect children's reading tastes and habits adversely because of lack of access to books, poor social infrastructure, and an absence of reading promotion programs (Greaney, 1986). This seemed particularly applicable to Jamaica, where some of the factors identified by Hamilton (1984) as militating against the reading habit include low literacy levels, a shortage of books, a traditionally oral culture, and a low per-capita income. The handful of studies conducted in Jamaica on children's reading interests and habits revealed that increased access to books made a difference in the quantities and types of books read; students were interested in books about African-Americans; and they were more responsive to books portraying the indigenous culture because they were able to identify with the characters and life situations (Floyd, 1973; Jennings-Wray, 1981; Headlam, 1989). The Study With one of the basic tenets for collection development being a proper knowledge of the users (in this case, children) and due to the paucity of research at the local level to provide more culture-specific guidelines for collection development, a nationwide survey of the voluntary reading interests and habits of Jamaican children was undertaken. One of its primary objectives was to discover the specific reading interests of 6th graders relative to certain book types based on the known reading interests of their peers in the developed world. This report focuses only on this aspect of the study. A random sample of 418 6th graders attending public schools was selected and stratified according to gender (girls 212, boys 206) and geography (urban 210, rural 208). Gender is known to be the most powerful predictor of reading interests (Norvell, 1973; Summers & Lukasevich, 1983; Whitehead, 1977). Geography was considered important in the Jamaican context, as it was anticipated that living in a rural or urban area could also affect reading interests (Downing, 1979). Sixth graders were chosen because at this age they tend to be at the peak of their reading. Also, 6th graders are generally expected to have clearly defined reading preferences and to be capable of expressing them (Huus, 1979; Meek, 1982; Schucking, 1966). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".