The Impact of Choice During a Free Pop Up Book Fair

Page by Page is an international, youth-led literacy organization run by children for children. Co-founded in April 2016, it now operates in all fifty states and more than ten countries, and has distributed roughly 750,000 books valued at over $3.6 million through about 150 physical book drives, keeping 1.1 million pounds of books in circulation and reaching an estimated 3.1 million people. The organization runs a virtual library for students at underserved schools, partners with roughly thirty three local nonprofits including Big Brothers Big Sisters of Miami, Breakthrough Miami, Camillus House, and Chapman Partnership, and works with Worldreader on the BookSmart app. It also produced the Page by Page Student Literacy Leadership Handbook, which the Florida Afterschool Program adopted as a statewide after school program. Among its programs is the free pop-up book fair, the subject of this paper. A pop-up fair takes the familiar structure of a school book fair, tables of donated books sorted by age and genre, bags waiting at the door, and removes the price. At the fair described here, held at Gulliver Preparatory in Miami, about two thousand donated books were laid out and children were told to take as many as they could carry.

This paper argues that the value of that model is not the transfer of books but the transfer of choice. It first explains how the studies reviewed here were selected. It then reviews evidence on unequal access to print, self-determination theory, experimental work on choice and intrinsic motivation, and a randomized trial in seventeen high-poverty Florida schools in which students who selected their own summer books outperformed peers who received none. It then offers a set of design suggestions for running a fair, identified as the author's own reasoning rather than as findings, and proposes a study that would separate choice from access.