People who grow up with books have better math and digital communication skills

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From Fast Company:

[In] a new study by Australian National University . . . researchers looked at 31 countries and the average household’s book-buying habits and found that the more books a home contained the better math, literacy, and digital communication skills children had when they reached adulthood.

In the study, participants stated how many books were in their house when they were children, ranging from “less than 10” to “more than 500.” It turns out those who said they had 80 or more books had much higher literacy skills (as could be expected), but also higher numerical and IT skills. And having more than 80 books was even better, as people who reported that they had 150 or 300 books scored even higher on math, literacy, and IT skills than did people who reported having 80 books (however, these improvements plateaued after the 350-book-mark).

Link to the rest at Fast Company

5 thoughts on “People who grow up with books have better math and digital communication skills”

  1. I think the term is “Correlative, not causative”.
    This is probably akin to saying people who habitually wear sports jerseys are more interested in sports than people who don’t habitually wear sports jerseys.
    Encouraging people to wear sports jerseys isn’t going to magically cause them to become sports fans.
    If you are raised in a household that shares a love of learning, including with it a love of literature, you will probably be exposed to both more books and more opportunities to develop math and digital skills.

    • People who grew up in houses with outhouses tend not to read on the toilet! 🙂

      (For those who’ve never experienced the joys of using an outhouse, it’s damn cold in the winter and hot and smelly in the summer… with lots of flies.)

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