Education Bookcast

I thought it was about time to cover something about books on this book-related podcast! Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham are two researchers who have spent their careers working together to understand the effects of reading on knowledge. Their research aims to answer a few questions in particular: 1. How much does reading matter in increasing people's knowledge? Is amount of reading irrelevant, since amount of information absorbed depends so much more strongly on innate intelligence than it does on exposure to more information? 2. How does reading compare to other sources of knowledge? Is reading particularly important or special in some way, or do people tend to gain as much and as high-quality information from other sources? The answers to these two sets of questions are very clear from Stanovich and Cunningham's research: 1. Reading is a much more important factor than innate intelligence, as far as knowledge is concerned. Extent of exposure to print even in literate societies varies greatly between i