In an era when teachers and school librarians are urging students to read more, especially for fun, a Rutgers study of 134 New Jersey seventh and eighth graders found the social media platform Bookji increased reading motivation among some of the students and also increased their interest visiting the school library and borrowing books.
Features that made Bookji effective, the researchers found, are the platform’s ability to create a peer-supported reading culture in which middle school students can discover books through classmates, discuss reading more openly with classmates, and express their emotional reactions to what they are reading through emojis and posts.
The paper, “Bookji and Middle School Reading Culture: Peer Influence, Emojis, and Reading Engagement” was written by Neil Grimes, the Education and Curriculum Materials Librarian at William Paterson University, and part-time SC&I doctoral student, and alumna Ellen Pozzi Ph.D.’13, a recent retired professor of educational leadership and professional studies at William Paterson University.
It was published in School Libraries Worldwide, the official professional peer-reviewed (refereed) research journal of the International Association of School Librarianship.
The study, the researchers said, addresses a gap in research on social media-style reading platforms designed specifically for educational settings and younger readers.
“The findings suggest that educators and school librarians can adapt features familiar from social media such as profiles, reactions, peer recommendations, and activity feeds to support literacy within a safer, educator-managed environment,” said Grimes. “Schools do not necessarily need to treat digital media and reading as competing activities. Carefully designed social reading experiences can use students’ existing communication habits to make reading more visible, socially accepted, and emotionally engaging.
“For educators and policymakers, the study supports investment in school libraries, trained school librarians, inclusive digital-literacy programs, and platforms like Bookji that protect student privacy. It also highlights the importance of providing multilingual access to socially mediated platforms and avoiding the assumption that simply introducing technology will improve reading engagement without sustained instructional and librarian support.”
Reading is often viewed as a private or solitary activity while social media is frequently assumed to distract young people from books, the authors said. “Our findings complicate both assumptions. In a protected, school-mediated environment, social media-style features helped make reading visible, conversational, and socially meaningful. Students were influenced by what classmates were reading and often preferred recommendations from friends. However, the platform itself did not automatically produce equal engagement. Librarian support, school context, language accessibility, and opportunities to use the platform affected participation.”
They were motivated to conduct the study, they said, because they sought to understand whether a school-managed social reading platform could strengthen middle school students’ motivation and engagement with reading. More specifically, they examined how Bookji’s peer recommendations, emojis, posts, and mapping features influenced students’ book choices, emotional connections to literature, geographic awareness, and use of the school library.
Grimes and Pozzi conducted the 12-week mixed-methods study during the Spring 2023 semester in two public middle schools in northern New Jersey. Having obtained Institutional Review Board approval and permission from both school districts, the study included seventh- and eighth-grade students, whose families provided consent, as well as two participating school librarians.
The researchers analyzed quantitative Bookji usage data, including books posted, emoji reactions, student posts, followers, and accounts followed. The qualitative portion included eight researcher-led geography lessons and observations, and four student focus groups: one seventh-grade and one eighth-grade group at each school, and semi-structured interviews with both school librarians at the conclusion of the study.
“Bringing these sources together enabled us to compare recorded platform activity with students’ and librarians’ descriptions of motivation, peer influence, emotional engagement, geographic exploration, and library use,” they said.
Additional findings include:
- Peer influence shaped book selection. Students frequently checked what their friends were reading and sometimes preferred peer recommendations to recommendations from adults. This suggests that reading-promotion programs should provide structured opportunities for students to recommend books to one another.
- Emojis offered a low-barrier form of emotional expression. Students used emojis to communicate whether books were funny, surprising, sad, exciting, or otherwise emotionally meaningful. This helped students respond to books without requiring a formal written review and may be particularly valuable for hesitant writers or students who find emotional expression through text difficult.
- Some students used the library more often. Students and librarians reported increased interest in borrowing books seen on the platform, and one librarian observed a noticeable increase in circulation. The study does not establish that Bookji alone caused these changes, but it suggests that peer-visible reading activity can connect online discovery with physical library use.
- The mapping feature had potential but was not a primary driver of engagement. Some students used it to explore settings connected to their family heritage and expressed pride when they found books associated with places that aligned with their cultural identity, such as the Dominican Republic. Overall use was limited, however, because most students were more interested in peers’ reading activity. Mapping may therefore be most effective when intentionally incorporated into lessons rather than offered as a stand-alone feature.
- The platform supported librarians’ professional work. Reading data helped librarians identify popular titles, understand students’ interests, personalize recommendations, design displays, and inform collection-development decisions.
“Engagement varied substantially by school and grade,” the authors noted. “Seventh graders were generally more active than eighth graders, and School 2 generated considerably more book posts, emoji reactions, followers, and interactions than School 1. The English-only design may also have limited participation among multilingual learners. These differences show that implementation conditions, student demographics, scheduling, educator facilitation, and platform accessibility matter.”
Learn more about the Ph.D. program at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information.
