Establishing a Tripartite Intelligent Reading Platform Connecting Schools, Families, and Students: An Approach with Chinese Characteristics to Promote Students’ Reading

Reading is important for students, but despite many efforts made to promote it, Chinese students generally do not spend much time reading. We believe the bottleneck lies in the difficulty of retaining students’ reading data, which makes it difficult for teachers and parents to know, manage, and guide students’ reading behaviors. Therefore, we establish a tripartite intelligent reading platform connecting schools, families, and students: schools assign reading tasks and give instructions on the platform; students “punch in” on the platform before and after the reading tasks; parents can get to check on their kids’ performance through the platform and also keep encouraging and supervising them to read. The platform has now been used in 110 schools in Guangzhou, and its significant effects are proved by large-scale survey statistics. Compared with traditional ways that aim at arousing students’ reading interest in the first place but are often eventually defeated by students’ massive compulsory homework under China’s educational system, our approach using mandatory methods is of great Chinese characteristics. In the beginning, the students might be “forced” to read by family-school collaboration. But gradually, external motivation would be transformed into internal motivation; students are becoming actively engaged in reading. In the future, based on the platform, Chinese governments and research institutes are preparing to establish large databases concerning reading and student’s development, which will hopefully make great contributions to educational decision-making and scientific research.