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The Science of Reading

Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today.

Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it.

Starting around 1900, researchers—convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy—began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader's eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned to read through the application of this science of reading. At the same time, workers fanned out across the land to extend the science of reading into the social realm, mapping the very geography of information for the first time. Their pioneering efforts revealed that the nation's most pressing problems were rooted in drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black—and they suggested ways to tackle those problems.

Today, much of how we experience our information society reflects the influence of these enterprises. This book explains both how the science of reading shaped our age and why, with so-called reading wars still plaguing schools across the nation, it remains bitterly contested.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 13, 2023
      This exhaustive outing by Johns (Death of a Pirate), a history professor at the University of Chicago, delves into how scientists have studied the psychological and physiological processes of reading. Early research, he contends, began after the Civil War when the demand for a better-trained industrial workforce and an informed citizenry led scientists to investigate how to improve literacy instruction. Highlighting their eye-opening findings, Johns describes an ophthalmologist’s discovery in the 1870s that “a reader’s eyes typically proceed by a series of abrupt jumps,” even though it feels as though they “pass smoothly along the line,” and he notes that modern neuroscience has confirmed that “a good reader is constantly predicting what words are likely to come next.” Johns covers major developments in the field, including the invention of eye movement tracking devices in the early 20th century, the 1960s hype around machines that promised to teach children to read, and long-standing debates about whether phonics instruction fosters literacy. The scope of the material is almost overwhelming—zigzagging between media theory, history, psychology, and educational policy—but readers will emerge with a deeper appreciation for the complexities of a daily activity many take for granted. This makes for a strong complement to Naomi S. Baron’s How We Read Now.

    • Kirkus

      February 15, 2023
      From its inception, the science of reading has been intertwined with American anxieties about culture. The science of reading, writes history professor Johns, began in the latter decades of the 19th century, as the proliferation of print in American life gave rise to worries that it would overwhelm a vulnerable public. The nascent field of experimental psychology studied the process of reading, developing two instruments that would be improved upon and used for decades to come: the tachistoscope, which measured how well subjects recognized words; and the eye-movement camera, which recorded the behavior of subjects' eyes as they read passages of text. The author's account ranges back and forth, tracing his topic's implication in eugenics, adaptation to improvements in World War II aircraft cockpit design, adoption by industry to improve the efficiency of the workforce, and incorporation into modern machine-reading technology. It's a mammoth subject, and Johns takes some detours to explore, for instance, mid-20th-century librarianship's adoption of the tools of science to expand its mission. In a later chapter on "the reading wars," the author delves into Rudolf Flesch's highly influential 1955 jeremiad, Why Johnny Can't Read, but those who have familiarity with the push-pull between whole-language and phonics-based teaching will have seen the planting of those seeds in the dismayed discovery that the early-20th-century turn toward science-based instruction in silent reading revealed a population of students with dyslexia. Johns' argument that this "Manichean dualism" has fed today's popular suspicion of scientific expertise is dismally convincing. The commercialization of the science of reading is also a constant, seen in the line of products leading from the Ophthalm-O-Graph through the Talking Typewriter, the Dynabook, and Hooked on Phonics, as well as such contemporary products as Feng-GUI and Microsoft's MCR. Illustrations include laboratory photographs of subjects at formidable-looking testing apparatus and equally daunting diagrams that attest to researchers' efforts. A leggy, fascinating survey of a discipline that is often taken for granted.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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