Motivating Boys to Read: Guys Read, a Summer Library Reading Program for Boys

A 2013 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report, How a Nation Engages with Art , illustrates that voluntary “literary” reading rates of adults have fallen 1 compared to an applauded rise in 2008. 2 Prior to these two reports, other NEA research showed a serious decline in both literary and book reading by adults of all ages, races, incomes, and education levels. 3 Other survey data measuring what youth do in their leisure time indicated that young men and women read fewer than twelve minutes per day. 4 These reports show that boys’ frequency of reading lags behind that of girls and that boys are reading neither the number of books nor the range of genres they should read as they progress through the elementary grades.