The relations between the reading habits of high-school students and academic success level

Information is continuing to be an important aspect of our life in this so-called ?Information Age?. Although there are numerous sources to get information, still the most reliable and healthy ways to reach them are the books. Nevertheless, people are accumulating information mainly from the books. It seems like the importance of reading in human life is not going to diminish. The amount of publication in a society is directly related to the developmental level of them. Besides, one can always appreciate the importance of success in human life. Academic success is the kind of success that we will be elaborating on. In this thesis, we studied ?The Relation between the Reading Habits and the Academic Success of the Secondary School Students?. We aimed to demonstrate that it is not enough for students to only study the given materials and homework, but rather to show to the students and teachers the importance of the extracurricular reading of books on the success on of students. We studied 509 students living in Kocaeli city and its districts. We used SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) as our statistical package. In the analysis of the data we used Student?s t-test to test the significance of the frequency (N), percentage (%), mean (X), and standard deviation (ss) whereas we used Anova in the multivariate analysis in the cases of n>30.Majority of the subjects (63.5 %) thinks that they do not reading enough books. This result shows that the reading habit is weak in our society. Besides this, a big part of the students (41.9 %) stated that watching TV or surfing on internet is preventing them from doing more reading. This result demonstrates that we prefer other entertainment means rather than reading. Another interesting finding of this study is that the children of the parents who read more tend to enjoy reading more. This result suggests that teachers and parents should collaborate more in order to help students to gain the habit of reading. Among the subjects that were participated in this study, only 14.8 % have stated that they read more than 21 books. This was another finding that underlines the low ratio of the students who read more. Reading was the 6th on the list of the activities that the students prefer to do in their spare time (9.3 %).Keywords: Reading, Reading habit, Academic success