I've long been a fan of Jim Trelease and his passionate advocacy for the power of reading aloud - see his book The Reading-Aloud Handbook, 6th ed., Penguin 2006.
Visiting his website this afternoon http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/ I came across this interesting item he has written about the formula devised by Wilbur Schramm, called the Fraction of Selection http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/fraction-selection.html
What it talks about is how often we do something - frequency - based on what we expect the rewards to be in relation to what the effort or difficulty might be...
Applied to reading, Trelease suggests the "rewards" might be pleasure - in escaping to another world, in finding answers to questions, in helping us study or achieve... The "effort" or difficulties might be distractions, lack of print, lack of time, learning disabilities, noise at home, negative attitudes...
"Where you maintain strong REWARD factors and lower the EFFORT factors, the stronger will be the frequency of reading. And the higher that number is for students, the higher will be their chances of success in school. Those who read the most, read the best."
It is a different way of thinking about the relationship of factors that set children up for reading success...
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