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WHY 30 MINUTES?
The Research Behind LightSail’s
Recommended Daily Reading Time
How many minutes per day should students be reading? What
is the relationship between how much students read and their
comprehension growth?
Learn how students reading on LightSail achieved tremendous
Lexile® growth by reading 30 minutes per day and about the
research base behind LightSail’s recommended daily reading time.
READING 30 MINUTES EACH DAY
Armed with data from the 2015-16 school year, LightSail has substantiated the powerful
impact of students reading thirty minutes a day. LightSail analyzed more than 16,000 students
and the results underscore how crucial each additional minute read is in driving Lexile
growth. Students who read fewer than 20 minutes per login only grew 1.7L per week and
underperformed the typical MetaMetrics growth of 1.95L. Students who read an additional 10
minutes, at an average of 24 minutes per login, saw gains of 4.5L per week, or 2.5 times typical
MetaMetrics growth. Students who read 30 minutes or more per login had average gains
of 4.9L per week, which is 3.1 times typical MetaMetrics growth and 2.8 times more Lexile
growth than LightSail students reading fewer than 20 minutes per login!Empirical evidence from the field indicates a strong positive correlation between volume ofreading and comprehension growth. In What Really Matters for Struggling Readers (2012),
Richard Allington notes, “Cipielewski and Stanovich (1992) found that individual differences in
reading comprehension growth were reliably linked to differences in ...exposure—volume of
reading—even when decoding skills were accounted for in the analyses” (p. 48). Furthermore,
Elley (1992) reports a strong positive correlation between the amount of time teachers allot
for silent reading during the school day and the comprehension levels of students. Leinhardt
and colleagues (1981) analyzed a variety of reading strategies designed to improve reading
achievement, noting that increasing the amount of silent reading proved to be the most
obvious way of increasing comprehension scores.
While any additional reading time correlates to higher reading scores, students reading for
more than 40 minutes see diminishing returns. Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1998) found
a strong correlation between time spent reading and performance on standardized reading
tests. When students jumped from 21.7 minutes of reading per day to 40.4 minutes, they
moved 20 percentile points; by comparison, adding another 50 minutes of reading each day
led to growth of only 8 percentile points.