Education Readings All three articles are scholarly because they were written by professional educators, mostly professors at the university level, who carried out statistical studies of the reading abilities of students. One of these studies used a control group, another compared males and females, and the third compared highly-motivated and less-motivated learners. In "Solving the Problem of Summer Reading Loss" (2011), James S. Kim and Thomas G. White studied four groups of 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students to determine the efficacy of summer reading programs. Kim was a professor at the Harvard School of Education and White a research scientist at the University of Virginia, and the focus of their research in was the well-known discrepancy in reading levels between low-income and middle-income students and between whites and minorities. Pok-Chua Siah, a professor of psychology and counseling...

In the study "Increasing Reading Comprehension through the Explicit Teaching of Reading" (2009), L. Prado, and elementary school teacher and L.A. Plourde, a university professor of education, compared the reading abilities of 4th grade students in order to determine the differences between how girls and boys learned to read.
These three academic articles all had sections referring to previous research in the fields and used statistical analysis to derive their results, while pointing out areas that needed further research. Prado and Plourde noted that past research had demonstrated that there were gender differences in brain activity and body chemistry which gave girls the advantage in learning how to read, so much so that by high school boys were twenty points behind on average. Girls had more signs or brain activity while reading and the test group of 57 students showed that they achieved significantly higher test scores on the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) from October to January in the 2009-09 school year. Both the boys and the girls took the same reading course that emphasized phonetics, making inferences, using background…