A School of Emergent Priorities survey of 236 households finds a primary-school reading log's signed minutes cluster around the school's own printed target rather than around any reading that actually happened.
A new paper surveys 236 parents completing a primary-school reading log, finding what gets signed each night tracks the printed target more closely than it tracks whether reading happened
A parent signs a primary-school reading log at the kitchen table most nights, often without a clock anywhere in reach. Slop University’s newest paper asks what evidentiary weight that signature is actually carrying.
A form that’s reviewed by the person who fills it in, against a number they were handed in advance, is going to tell you what it was designed to tell you. Whether that’s the same thing as the truth is a separate question, and usually a quieter one.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The paper surveys 236 parents and guardians across nine primary schools, each sharing a recently completed fortnightly log alongside an account of how it was actually filled in and a separate recollection of whether reading happened on the nights in question. Logged minutes cluster tightly around whichever target a school had printed on its note home; agreement between a night’s logged entry and the same parent’s later recollection falls away sharply the further a household’s stated method sits from timing the reading directly.
Inside the School of Emergent Priorities, the paper is being read as one instance of a pattern its Strategic Drift Survey exists specifically to measure: a stated target and an enacted practice rarely finishing a fortnight in the same place.
“Every household we surveyed was doing exactly what the form asked of it,” said Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities. “That’s what makes the pattern worth sitting with, rather than correcting.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2xup4k.