We used Google to see if there is any relevant information out there about our study. We wanted to see if similar studies were conducted and their results. We started out with typing in Google “average ACT score by State” and we found more than a 15 million hits. Out those found, none of them were relevant to our study. Therefore replaced “average ACT score by State” with “ACT High School reports”. We found about 72.9 million hits. The first site that showed up was “ACT High School Profile report”. This gave us the 2007 National ACT scores with different groupings. The one we were most interested in was gender. We found that the average score of Reading for the 2007 Graduating Females was 21.2 out of 36 whereas for the males the average score was 21.6 out of 36. http://www.act.org/news/data/08/pdf/two.pdf

Next we thought that it would be more helpful to narrow it down to our state and find more recent data. So we typed in “Act scores by state” in Google to do a more in depth search of the information. We got over a million results. The one we were most interested in was the Act.org website. This website gave us the average ACT scores for the last ten years. We picked the most recent year which was 2008. This gave us a choice to look at state or national scores. We chose the state of Ohio and found thorough information about the student scores by gender which is also being compared to the national scores. We found out that in the state of Ohio the average ACT scores for females was 22 out of 36 and the average ACT scores for males was 22.1 out of 36. According to the information found, males tend to do slightly better in the reading section of ACT vs. females. www.act.org/news/data/08/pdf/states/Ohio.pdf

Furthermore we liked to see if the number of books read has any association with the average reading scores. If so, do males read more books than females?  In order to find the answer to this question, I typed in “do males read more books?” into the Google search engine. This gave us more than 15million hits; however, none of them were relevant to what we are trying to find. Then, I replace males with females and out of the 48 million hits; I got a few studies that conducted surveys saying “Why women read more books”. So I choose the page that is from Guardian.com. This webpage gave information about a survey they conducted asking “Do you have shelves full of books that have never been opened?” Out of the 2000 people asked this question, 17% percent of the women said yes and 20% of the men said yes. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/22/women-reading-books-study Does this show that reading books doesn’t have any association with the peoples reading scores?

By doing this study, we would like to see if there is an association with standardized reading scores vs. how many books a person reads. The background gave no conclusive evidence either way. We found that males tend to do better in reading section of a college entrance exam. But, we found no evidence as to there being an inverse relationship between reading scores and books read because they were two different studies. We found no studies that were done like the one we would like to do. We found that our question has intrigued people for a long while and we would like to find a definite answer.