Children’s voluntary summer reading in Norway: Insights gained from the gamified library-initiated reading campaign Sommerles.no

What is Sommerles.no?

Sommerles was initially created by Vestfold County Library in 2012 as a regional reading campaign for the public libraries in said county. The goal was to stimulate children between the ages 6 and 12 to enjoy free reading for their own pleasure during the summer vacation, as, according to Krashen (1993, 2004), although any kind of reading will improve reading skills, free reading for pleasure is considered the most powerful tool in language education.

The campaign started out as a traditional paper-based reading campaign, where the participating children recorded book titles and pages read on a sheet of paper and picked up prizes for reading at the libraries. Having been introduced to the concept of gamification; “the process of applying game mechanics and game thinking to the real world to solve problems and engage users” (Felker, 2014), at the Next Library conference in Denmark, the Sommerles team, led by Pernilla Slotte Hjermann, teamed up with the game development company Snuti to gamify the campaign in response to the growing number of children gamers.² In 2014 the Sommerles.no online campaign was launched.

Sommerles.no combines elements from storytelling, gamification and digital and physical reward systems with physical events, such as kickoffs and end-of-season parties. The project uses approaches from gamification, such as requiring the children to create an anonymous profile using a nickname, letting them earn “experience points” for every page they read and reach higher “levels” based on these experience points. The participants receive both virtual trophies as well as physical rewards to be collected from their local libraries, thereby creating opportunities for them to receive guidance from librarians and discover more reading materials. Although Krashen (2004), in principle, does not encourage rewarding children for free reading, this strategy has proved fruitful for Sommerles.no, as the number of participating children has increased sharply every year since its digitalization, as has the number of participating libraries. The libraries in turn report a sharp increase in the books loaned by children during the Sommerles.no period from June 1st to September 1st.³

Sommerles.no rapidly spread to other counties, and, from 2018, covered the entire country; however, all communities did not participate. The 105,319 children enrolled in the program in 2018 represent one in five children in this age group nationwide and one in four in the participating communities.⁴ The actual participation is, however, lower, as nearly 21% (21,940) of the registered users did not register any pages read at all.

Due to the focus of Sommerles.no on free voluntary reading for pleasure, the campaign has no formal ties to the school system. Nevertheless, some teachers actively stimulate their students’ participation by handing out information about the campaign in class, inviting a librarian into the classroom to talk about Sommerles.no and by bringing their students to the library to receive information about the campaign or for its formal kick-off. Some teachers even made the campaign an active part of the pre-summer wind down, whereas others did not. The collaboration between schools and libraries will be studied in a future paper.

Home language

As may be remembered from the introduction, multilingual children in Norway score lower than monolingual children in the international PIRLS reading tests (Strand et al., 2017) and have done so in all the previous rounds of tests, performed in 2001, 2006 & 2011 (Kjærnsli & Jensen, 2016; Kjærnsli & Olsen, 2013; Gabrielsen, 2013b; Mullis et al., 2003, 2007, 2012; Van Daal, Solheim, Gabrielsen & Begnum, 2007; Wagner, 2004). This trend is also observed in the other Scandinavian countries, as well as in Finland. (Mullis et al., 2003, 2007, 2012). According to Strand et al. (2017), in the Norwegian 5th grade national tests, children from an immigrant background and second-generation immigrants are overrepresented in the lowest score category in reading, maths and English. In the international PIRLS results, however, children who state that they “almost always speak the test language at home” i.e. multilingual children, score higher than children who always speak the test language at home (i.e. monolingual children). Interestingly, the percentage of multilingual children in Norwegian schools does not seem to affect the PIRLS scores, as no differences in scores are reported between schools with a student base of 90% monolingual Norwegian children, schools with more than 50% monolingual Norwegian children and schools with less than 50% monolingual Norwegian (Gabrielsen, 2013a; Strand et al., 2017).

According to Grosjean (2010, 2013), over half the world’s population is estimated to be bilingual, meaning that they speak two or more languages. More than 65% of the inhabitants of the European Union and 90% of the inhabitants of Norway of working age speak a second language, whereas 40% of the Norwegian population of working age speaks three or more foreign languages.¹¹ Children in Norway learn English from first grade and grow up to be functionally bilingual. Consequently, the fact that children grow up bilingual or multilingual cannot in itself explain the lower reading test scores of multilingual children.

Biligualism and multilingualism are notoriously hard concepts to define. As we will see in the next paragraph, bilingualism is defined in a series of different ways depending on the context it is used in (Appel & Muysken, 2006; Grosjean, 2013), and that different definitions can be observed in different levels of government in the Norwegian context. In addition, the field of biculturalism (where one person parttakes in the life of two or more cultures and blends and adapts elements from said cultures) is poorly studied (Grosjean, 2013).

Norway, like many European countries, presents a complex linguistic reality of two official languages, Norwegian and Sámi, where Norwegian has two written varieties and Sámi 10 varieties, of which four are spoken in Norway today.¹² Also, a series of national minority languages are protected by White Paper No. 15 (2000–2001) on Norwegian National Minorities: State Policy regarding Jews, Kvens, Roma, Romani People/Taters and Forest Finns (Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, 2001). The speakers of these languages, as well as Sámi speakers, have to interact in the Norwegian society in Norwegian and are consequently bilingual. The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (Utdanningsdirektoratet) defines student speakers of minority languages as “children with a mother tongue different from Norwegian and Sámi”.¹³ Statistics Norway’s definition of speakers of minority languages is “children speaking a mother tongue at home different from Norwegian, Sámi, Danish, Swedish or English, and where both parents speak a different language at home than these languages” thereby excluding immigrants from Scandinavia and the English-speaking world as well as children from intermarriages (one Norwegian parent). According to Statistics Norway, approximately 30,000 intermarriages were registered during the period of 1990–2016, these being mainly Norwegian men who married women from Thailand, the Philippines and Russia. Many of these women brought children they had birthed previously with them to Norway (Dalgaard, 2018).

In addition, bilingualism is found in other Norwegian communities ranging from children of diplomats, expats, children of returned Norwegian expats who still speak other languages at home, first and successive generations of immigrants, as well as refugees, and many of these groups fall outside the definitions of the speakers of minority languages by Utdanningsdirektoratet and Statistics Norway. This study therefore adopts the definition of bilingualism/multilingualism used in the ePRILS 2016: “a person who has grown up speaking two or more languages and who identifies with these languages and/or a person who identifies with two or more languages and uses more than one language on a daily basis, even if that person does not dominate both/all languages equally well” (Barne-, likestillings- og inkluderingsdepartementet, 2012, s. 49, translation: the authors). In order to convey this complex content to primary school children, the survey used the following question: “Do you speak languages other than Norwegian at home?” This is in line with the wording in PIRLS 2016 (Strand et al., 2017). In order to account for the confusion created by the different definitions of bilingualism, the children were asked to specify the languages spoken at home.

One possible explanation for the lower scores of multilingual children in Norway is found in the results from the 2018 version of PISA survey,¹⁴ which presented the following explanation for why an increasing number of Norwegian elementary school students are struggeling with reading:

At least over the more recent period (2009–18), performance trends in Norway were influenced by the concurrent increase in the proportion of immigrant students who tended to score below non-immigrant students. It could be estimated that, if the student population in 2009 had the same demographic profile as the population in 2018, the average score in reading would have been 497 points. In reality, the average score observed in 2009 was 503 points. The (non-significant) decline in mean performance between 2009 and 2018 could therefore be entirely explained by the changing demographic composition of the student population.¹⁵

Gender differences and gamification

The PISA 2018, the PIRLS and the ePIRLS surveys document the existence of large differences in the reading scores of girls and boys in Norway, and demonstrate that, in general, boys read less and struggle more with reading than girls (OECD, 2019). The lending statistics from libraries support this view, confirming that boys borrow fewer books than girls (Kverndokken, 2013). According to Roe (2013), there are many possible reasons why girls read more than boys, have more positive attitudes towards reading and perform better on reading tests. One reason may be that there is simply not as much reading material targeting and engaging boys, where especially fiction and other longer texts appear to be lacking. Fiction provides a lot of reading training, expands the vocabulary and allows for reflection and personal development, and a series of reading campaigns focused on fiction have therefore been initiated. Roe (2013) believes that reading campaigns can promote reading, however, it is important that the texts provided target the students’ field of interest. Students cannot be forced into liking reading; they must figure it out for themselves, but through well-made reading campaigns, they can be lured into the world of books. Reading motivation, often defined as “the individual’s personal goals, values, and beliefs with regard to the topics, processes, and outcomes of reading” (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000, p. 405), is therefore seen as both a critical contributor to and highly related to reading achievement (Anmarkrud & Bråten, 2009; Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Curtis, 2002; Wang & Guthrie, 2004).

Another reason why boys read less than girls may be that boys’ view reading as less attractive than other activities, such as playing computer games (Roe, 2013). Støle and Schwippert (2017) point out that the gender differences are significantly lower in the electronic ePIRLS survey than in the paper-based PIRLS 2016 and refer to Martin and Binkley (2009), who claim that boys are presumed to be more interested in and therefore have accumulated more experience with computers and dynamic formats than girls. According to the Norwegian Media Authority (Medietilsynet), however, 91% of all Norwegian girls in the PIRLS age group of 9 to 11 years game, as do 98% of all boys at that age (Medietilsynet, 2020), and familiarity with computers therefore cannot account for the aforementioned difference Martin and Binkley (2009) do however make an important point about gamification:

[…] computer tests that deliver content in new and more dynamic formats are especially attractive to boys. This explicitly includes the possibility of presenting tasks in the form of games with the added aspect of competition that is also more positively received by boys than by girls. (p. 80)

Although the percentage of male and female gamers is almost equal between the ages 9 and 11, statistics from the Norwegian Media Authority show that where the boys’ interest in gaming remains stable at 97–98% of the population until the age of 18, the percentage of girl gamers decline with age, presumably in favor of social media, and for 15–18-year old’s is down to 62% (Medietilsynet, 2020, p. 5). It therefore appears that it is not the computer itself, but the gaming aspect that keeps boys interested. Using children’s interest in gaming as a starting point is therefore a clever strategy for creating motivation for reading for boys in general, and for girls in this particular age group.

Gamification, as one may remember, is defined as “the process of applying game mechanics and game thinking to the real world to solve problems and engage users” (Felker, 2014). Game mechanics are known to stimulate engagement and participation (Muntean, 2011), and examples of game mechanics are reward systems such as badges, score-points, levels and leaderboards. Leaderboards are lists of participants in a competition who are ordered according to a variable, such as their scores (from highest to lowest) (Costa, Wehbe, Robb & Nacke, 2013), and are used to motivate participants to strive to reach the top of the list and to keep track of the competition (Kapp, 2013). Levels are used to maintain the player’s interest in the game, as they both indicate the player’s progress, and helps the player keep track of her position in the game over time (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). Points are used in most games, as points are given to players as rewards for following the rules of the game and complying with the desired behaviour patterns (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). Badges are also a reward mechanism associated with the gaming world, as players receive badges as a symbol for completing a specific task in the desired manner. Many players experience gratification in receiving badges (Kapp, 2013), and in the words of Zichermann and Cunningham (2011): “In addition to signaling status, people desire badges for all kinds of reasons. For many people, collecting is a powerful drive”.

All of these game mechanics are used as tools to motivate the player to walk the extra mile. As a consequence, both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation plays a part in most of the elements. Reaching the top of a leaderboard may produce internal motivation by inducing a feeling of mastery based on the player’s own skills, and thereby satisfying the psychological need for feeling mastery based on one’s own competence. The points earned may produce extrinsic motivation, as the players are driven by factors such as recognition and status (Kapp, 2013), or intrinsic motivation, as they experience mastery. The players are also motivated by receiving rewards, which may lead to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

The overall goal of gamification is to achieve higher efficiency and engage the children, and the field of education is one of the areas where gamification is most commonly used (Landers, 2014). The point of using gamification is to create a returning effect by creating a routine that allows the children to do an activity that is subsequently rewarded. The customer, or the player, may feel that she is progressing towards a goal (Felker, 2014).

How is meaningful gamification achieved? First of all, just as in gaming, engaging in the gamified elements must be perceived as voluntary. Every child is not motivated by points and leaderboards, and, for some, these game mechanics may indeed be discouraging or demotivating. Learning from the self-determination theory of motivation, one ought to create student-focused activities that fulfill needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness (connected to something beyond yourself) (Tan & Hew, 2016). When these three motivators are engaged, an activity will be intrinsically worthwhile (Kapp, 2013).

Pages read by gender and home language

According to the literature on summer reading programs, the benefit of participating in a reading campaign is closely connected to the amount of reading done during the summer (Heyns, 1978; Kim, 2004). The correlation between children’s reading during their free time and scores in PIRLS and ePIRLS can also be clearly observed: The more reading they do during their free time, the higher their scores (Støle & Schwippert, 2017). In principle, the effect of reading campaigns for the users is the additional reading done during the summer because of the campaign. Unfortunately, we cannot observe the additional reading the children did as a result of their participation in the campaign directly, since we do not know what they would have read if they had not participated. However, we can examine in detail how the number of pages read differs among groups and compare this to the relevant official statistics. In this section, our focus is on differences between genders and spoken home languages.

Table 2 presents descriptive statistics for the number of pages read during the Sommerles.no 2018 period by gender and spoken home language. The average number of pages read by the participants was 1,169, which entails reading around 13 pages per day in the 92-day Sommerles.no period from June 1st to September 1st. The median – which represents the typical reading for a given student – is, however, much lower at 550 (6 pages a day). One of the main reasons for this difference is that nearly 21% (21,940) of the registered users did not register any pages read at all.

We focus on the median when presenting the differences between the groups. The reason for this is that the distribution of pages read is highly skewed (see Figure 2). Half the readers have read less than 500 pages (5 pages per day), and 90% have read less than 3,000 pages. A few have, however, read a lot more: The highest reported number of pages read is 45,229. Since all types of reading material can be registered in Sommerles.no ranging from picture books, audiobooks and some cartoons to the Bible, a “page” is not a fixed entity, and no word count is reported. It is possible for children who want to quickly ascend in levels to read simple texts with few words on each page if they so desire. These few very high observations will therefore affect the mean values to a large degree, making the mean a poor representation of the “typical” reader.

In Figure 2 the extreme outliers are removed. As can be observed, more than 50% of the children have read less than 500 pages (5 pages per day), and only 10% have read more than 3,000 pages (33 pages per day). The resulting graph roughly mirrors the distribution of the reported reading habits of the participants in PIRLS and ePIRLS, where children are asked how much they read in their free time on a normal school day. In total 58% of the children report reading for less than 30 minutes, 34% read between 30 minutes and one hour, whereas 9% read for more than an hour a day.

Gender differences

Table 2 shows that girls read slightly more than the boys: the median for girls is 567 pages, while that for boys is 527. The mean of the pages read shows the same pattern as the median. The mean pages read is higher than the median because of the skewed distribution. The difference between the means for boys and girls is also statistically significant (t-value of –4.08). As noted in a previous section, 43% of the participants in Sommerles.no are boys. The percentage of participating boys is significant given that 60% of the male respondents in ePIRLS report reading less than 30 minutes a day (Støle & Schwippert, 2017).

Both in the PIRLS and the ePIRLS¹⁷ reading tests, the students who read the most during their free time, achieve the best results (Støle & Schwippert, 2017). Of all Norwegian elementary school students (girls and boys are equally represented), 9% read more than one hour a day, and this group achieves 606 points in ePIRLS. Students who read less than 30 minutes a day, however, receive an average of 555 points in ePIRLS, and the lowest score of all Norwegian students. The reading is divided into two categories: Reading for pleasure and reading for learning (Lundetræ & Solheim, 2013).

Both the PISA and PIRLS surveys also report significant variation in reading literacy among Norwegian girls and boys. The recent OECD report The gender gap in educational outcomes in Norway (Borgonovi et al., 2018) states that “Gender gaps in reading are very wide in Norway at the primary school level” explaining this statement in the following manner:

[…] in 2016, 4th grade girls outperformed 4th grade boys by 18 points in the PIRLS reading assessment in Norway, a difference of about one fifth of a standard deviation. The gender gap is similar to the one estimated in the first two rounds of PIRLS in 2001 and 2006, while in 2011 it was reduced to 14 points. […] the scores of 4th grade boys and girls have been improving in Norway, but the distance between them has remained somewhat constant except in 2011. (Borgonovi et al., 2018, p. 19)

Pages read by home language

Of the 105,319 children participating in Sommerles.no in 2018, a total of 6,753 report that they are multilingual and speak among them a total 52 different languages at home. In addition, 3,989 also report that they read languages other than Norwegian.

The most frequently registered languages (apart from Norwegian) in Sommerles.no (see column 1) are English, Polish, Arabian, Swedish, German, Somali, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Kurdish, Tigrinya and Urdu, which roughly mirrors the Norwegian directorate of integration and diversity (IMDi) overview of the origin of Norwegian immigrants: 54% are originally from Europe, whereas 31% are from Asia and 13% are from Africa. Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, Syria, Somalia, Germany, Iraq, Eritrea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, Denmark and Iran were the largest contributors of immigrants, closely followed by Russia and Afghanistan.¹⁹ As reporting their home language was not obligatory, the number of students with home languages other than Norwegian may be under-reported.

One explanation for the presumed under-representation of children who speak languages other than Norwegian at home is related to the fact that, due to GDPR regulations, only parents or guardians can sign their children up for Sommerles.no. In 2018, information on Sommerles.no was only provided in the two written Norwegian standards, thereby requiring that parents must master reading a rather long and technical text on GDPR regulations in Norwegian. This represents a major hindrance for children of first-generation immigrants, as well as for children of weak readers.

The table also includes the Sámi language, although it is only the 38th most frequently registered language, as the language is one of the two official languages of Norway. Looking at the median at 754, we see that those who do participate read substantially more pages than the participants whose spoken home language is Norwegian (549).

Interestingly enough, on November 26th 2019, the Office of the Auditor General of Norway published a report on Sámi students’ right to education both on and in Sámi (Riksrevisjonens undersøkelse av samiske elevers rett til opplæring i og på samisk Dokument 3:5 (2019–2020)), which states that there is a general lack of resources in the education in Sámi; both a lack of qualified teachers in the various Sámi language varieties and a lack of educational resources, such as books and electronic learning resources, is described. In addition, the Office of the Auditor General of Norway states that the education in Sámi is poorly organized and not advertised well enough. Sámi students living outside the main Sámi areas are entitled to a web-based education in Sámi; however, the quality of this education is not found to be equivalent to neither the Norwegian standard nor to the in situ Sámi education. In addition, the report states that very little literature exists in the Sámi languages (Office of the Auditor General, 2019). Here, more research on the factors that hinder or stimulate the participation of children who speak Sámi and national minority languages is needed in order to target these groups specifically.

Looking in detail at the pages read for the other multilingual groups (Figure 3), it seems apparent that students with a European language background generally register a higher number of pages read than their non-European counterparts. Students from European countries read on average more than 500 pages during the Sommerles.no period, and students who speak Western European languages such as French (1,070 pages), Danish (1,055 pages), German (1,039 pages), at home have the highest median of pages read. This finding is consistent with that of Steinkellner (2017), who found that since registration began in 2007, Norwegian-born children of Western European immigrants score higher on all tests in grades 8 and 9 than any other groups. The only non-Western-European language background students who score higher than the Norwegians in Sommerles.no, are Russians, whereas children who register Lithuanian and Polish as their home language, score slightly lower than the Norwegians. The exception to this pattern of higher European scores is Albanian, with a median of only 149, which is far below the children with non-Western European language backgrounds. There may be many reasons for this result, however, Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and invests only 3% of its GDP in schooling, whereas most OECD countries invest 5%. In comparison, the highest median registered for pages by speakers of non-European languages are by students who speak Kurdish (479), Urdu (430), Somali (351), Tigrinya (280) and Arabic (250) at home. Possible explanations for the difference between Western European and non-Western European scores could be linked to the relative similarity or difference between these students’ home languages and Norwegian as well as to socio-economic factors, such as work immigrant versus refugee status.

According to IMDi, the majority of immigrants that moved to Norway from the year 2007 to 2015 were work immigrants from Poland, the Baltic states^20,21 and other Scandinavian countries, and these groups still constitute the largest population of immigrants in Norway. According to Statistics Norway, work immigrants have a higher level of education than the Norwegian population, as 45% have higher education, and 40% have finished their secondary education (Steinkellner, 2017). Refugees constitute 4% of the Norwegian population and 30% of the immigrant population. Somalia is the largest contributor, followed by Syria and Iraq.²² According to Statistics Norway, more than half of the students receiving their education in their mother tongue or receiving their education in both Norwegian and their home-language, speak Arabic, Somali, Polish, Kurdish or Urdu²³ at home, where Arabic (2,600 children) and Somali (1,900) represent the two largest groups (Steinkellner, 2017). Norway currently has 170,000 Norwegian born children of immigrant parents, where 10% have Pakistani parents, 8% Somali parents and 7% Polish parents.²⁴

In the case of Somali students, official UN information states that, after more than two decades of conflict, Somalia has one of the lowest enrollment rates for primary school children in the world. Only 30% of children are in school, and only 40% of the children in school are girls (UNICEF, 2019). The situation is slightly better in Eritrea, where Tigrinya is one of the main languages, with a child enrollment rate of 55% in 2016. Arabic speakers constitute the largest group of refugees world wide today, with Syria and Palestine as the largest contributors of Arabic-speaking refugees (United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees, 2019).

Currently, the number of children and adolescents born outside Europe (including recently arrived refugee and migrant children) who leave school early is nearly twice as high as that for native-born children. Migrant children also have lower learning outcomes when they are not given adequate support. For example, around three in four native-born students attain proficiency in science, reading and math, but only 3 in 5 students with a migrant background do (United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees, 2019). The UN is now calling on European countries to “increase resources and practical support for their school systems to ensure all refugee, asylum-seeking and migrant children can access and stay in quality education (United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees, 2019). Other possible contributing explanations may be related to the access to reading material in the language spoken at home. Libraries may order books in 70 languages from Det flerspråklige bibliotek²⁵ (lit: The multilingual library); however, this information must be available to book-readers in a language that they are able to understand for them to be able to communicate their need to the local library. In addition, very few books exist for instance in Somali, and Verdensbiblioteket.no²⁶ (lit: The world library), a library of international texts from which library users can order books and to pick up in their local library, only lists a total of 41.

Motivation and gamification

Sommerles.no is designed as a pure reward system, using extrinsic motivation to stimulate reading for pleasure in the hope that children will discover the joys of reading and becoming self-motivated readers.²⁷ The main target group for Sommerles.no is 3rd to 5th grade students (9 to 11-year-olds), and currently 93% of all nine-year-olds – both boys and girls – game. However, from the age of ten, the number of girl gamers starts to decline, whereas the percentage for boys increases. At ages 11 to 12, 98–99% of all Norwegian boys game, and the percentage of gamers in total is above 90.²⁸ The gaming approach therefore appears to be perfect for the campaign’s targeted age group, and in fact, participation in the campaign has risen sharply every year since its gamification (see Figure 1).

Sommerles.no employs common gaming mechanics, such as earning “experience points” for every page read (including some comic books) and even for reading aloud for siblings or younger friends.²⁹ The experience points allow the readers to reach higher “levels,” where they are awarded both virtual trophies as well as physical prizes that are to be collected at the local libraries. The latter was implemented in order to create opportunities for drawing children into the libraries to explore, meet the librarians and discover more reading materials, in accordance with Fiore and Roman (2012). According to Felker (2014), the gaming concept may be especially important for students who are weaker readers or read less than the average, as it helps them stay entertained and entices them to come back to read more (Felker, 2014). Leaderboards are used in a modified manner in Sommerles.no. As a general focus on competition between the participants may be perceived as demotivating for weaker or younger readers, and is therefore unwanted, the game is construed as a way for the individual participant to compete with oneself, where the participants earn badges and physical rewards at age-appropriate intervals. The participants may, however, invite friends to follow their progress, and may chat and compete with these friends if they so desire.

There is conflicting information in the literature on the impact of gamification on student engagement and motivation and the achievement of learning outcomes. One view presented by Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa (2014) is that gamification may prove to have only a transient positive effect on some users, as a novelty effect that can wear off in the long run. Sommerles.no being a 92-day campaign designed to motivate children to read – and maintain their reading competence – over the summer plays on this novelty effect by introducing a new theme, a new story and new rewards every year. It is designed to be a happening, but a happening that literally “opens the doors to Narnia” for children and introduces them to the parallel universe of reading for the pure joy of it. By establishing a relation between the child and the library over the summer, the hope is twofold: First that children will continue reading and continue borrowing books even when the summer is over, and secondly to counteract possible negative correlations created by socioeconomic factors, such as the parents’ educational level and the access to books at home (Strand et al., 2017). This takes us back to Støle and Schwippert (2017), Strand et al. (2017) and the measures proposed in the PISA 2018 survey:³⁰ it is important that childrens’ interest in reading is not only stimulated, one must attempt to stimulate them into falling in love with reading due to the correlation between reading for pleasure and higher scores in the PIRLS and ePIRLS studies for both sexes and all language backgrounds. In the words of the PISA 2018 report; more opportunities for reading for pleasure must be created.³¹ Given that the gender differences observed indicate that a larger percentage of girls read for pleasure every day, whereas a larger percentage of boys never read for pleasure, any measure that motivates boys to read more for pleasure must surely be applauded.