Shared Reading as Embedded Evaluation
Shared Reading: Literature Read Aloud and Shared
A transdisciplinary AHRC-funded project exploring how literary language representing dementia affects readers, leading to an ongoing programme of shared reading groups for people living with dementia. Led by Dr Jane Lugea (Reader in English Language, Stylistics) at Queen’s University Belfast, the project used reading groups with different kinds of people to understand how reading literature featuring characters with dementia impacted their understanding of the condition. The work gave rise to the Still Reading programme, delivering ongoing shared reading sessions with Dementia NI members across Northern Ireland, and beyond.
Shared Reading as Embedded Evaluation
Read a short piece of literature aloud with a group, who can listen and/or read along from the page. The spontaneous, live responses people give to imaginative writing tell you far more about their experience than any feedback form they fill in afterwards.
Phase 0: Know What This Method Is (and Is Not)
Shared reading works because good quality literature, read aloud in the moment, produces spontaneous and emotionally honest responses that are otherwise very difficult to access. The evaluation responses are live and unscripted. This method is best suited to programmes where you need to evidence emotional impact, empathy, wellbeing, or social connection.
Best Used When
You are evaluating a wellbeing, arts, community, or literary programme; your participants find written forms difficult or alienating; you need quotable, emotionally rich evidence of human change; or you want data that captures lived experience, not just satisfaction ratings.
Key Stakeholders
Facilitators, community practitioners, arts workers, health and social care staff, librarians, programme managers, and funders who need evidence of outcomes that are hard to measure through conventional surveys, including wellbeing, social connection, and empathy.
Ask Yourself Before You Begin:
- “Is the literature I have chosen genuinely good quality? Does it make people think and feel, or does it just describe something relevant to my project? The quality of the writing is not decoration, it is the mechanism.”
- “Do I know my group well enough to select texts that will resonate with them? Have I found out their interests, backgrounds, and reading experience before I arrive?”
- “Am I prepared for people to share something personal or painful? Do I have a safeguarding plan, and is there someone else in the room who can support a participant if needed?”
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Choose the Right Text
The literature you select is the engine of the whole method. Good shared reading texts are short (500-1,000 words of prose, or a single poem), high quality, and built around a genuine human tension, one that has no obvious resolution and that connects to the themes of the programme you are evaluating without being so on-the-nose that people feel manipulated.
The Details:
- Action: Identify two or three candidate texts before the session. Arrive with options rather than a fixed choice: a short story extract, a poem, or a brief passage of literary prose. Bring texts that speak to your theme through the specificity of character and situation, not through explicit message. Base your final choice on the group in front of you: their age, background, energy, and what comes up in the first few minutes of conversation.
- Tip: The best texts produce what Jane Lugea calls “visceral, spontaneous, honest” responses, the kind that emerge in the moment rather than ones people have had time to curate. Short is almost always better. If participants with cognitive impairments are in the room, limit extracts to around 500 words; if the group is mixed, have a longer option ready. Avoid texts where the theme is so close to participants’ experience that it risks distress rather than recognition.
Set Up the Room
Shared reading sessions work best when they feel like a social occasion, not a data-collection exercise. Physical environment matters: a circle of chairs, refreshments on the table, no clipboards in sight. The goal is to create the conditions in which people forget they are being observed and simply respond to what they are hearing.
The Details:
- Action: Arrange seating in a circle or around a table where everyone can see each other. Provide tea and biscuits if possible: this is not incidental. The pilot session in Jane Lugea’s research found that the informal, refreshments-included setting was a significant factor in producing naturalistic responses. Print copies of the text in a font size appropriate for your group (14pt minimum; larger for older participants or people with sight difficulties). Introduce the session as a reading and conversation, not an evaluation.
- Tip: Never frame the session as evaluation or research in your opening remarks. Introduce it as reading together. The evaluation happens within the session through your observation and note-taking, not through forms the participants fill in. If you need to explain the purpose of the session, say you are exploring how people respond to literature, and that all responses are valid and welcome (this is not an English Lit Class): this is accurate and does not prime participants to perform.
Read Aloud, Slowly
The facilitator reads aloud from the text, slowly and clearly. This is not a performance. It is a deliberate slowing down that makes the session feel mindful and gives every word its proper weight. Reading slowly, in your own accent, is one of the distinguishing features of the method and one of the most important practical skills.
The Details:
- Action: Read the extract at roughly half the speed that feels natural. Pause at line breaks and after significant moments. Participants follow along on their printed copies if they wish. If participants cannot read the printed text (due to cognitive, visual or literacy difficulties), the audio reading carries everything: the printed copy is a support, not a requirement. After the reading, sit in silence for a moment before opening the conversation. Do not rush to fill the quiet.
- Tip: For research purposes, Jane Lugea’s original project used a standardised audio recording so that every group heard the same voice. For evaluation purposes, your own live reading is better. It signals that this is a shared human experience. Members of Jane’s dementia groups were sometimes invited to read passages themselves: do so when it feels right, as it produces particularly rich data about the participant’s relationship to the text and their own capacity to engage.
Open the Conversation
After the reading, open the floor with a simple, non-leading question. What follows is the primary source of your evaluation data: spontaneous, in-the-moment responses to what participants have just heard. Your role as facilitator is to hold the space and keep the conversation honest, not to direct it toward particular answers.
The Details:
- Action: Open with a single open question: “What do you make of that?” or “What struck you?” Let the conversation develop naturally. As it does, take discrete notes (or have a co-facilitator do so) of specific responses: direct quotes, moments of emotional engagement, instances of participants connecting the text to their own experience, and any shifts in the room’s energy. If the group goes quiet or stays with one idea for a long time, that is data too.
- Tip: Resist the urge to redirect the conversation toward your evaluation questions. If participants talk about the character rather than the theme you are evaluating, follow them. The route they take tells you something about what resonated. If the conversation opens up personal disclosures, respond with care and avoid pressing for elaboration: the evaluation value is in the fact of the disclosure, not in extracting more detail. Have a named person in the room who can follow up with any participant who seems distressed after the session.
Close and Capture
Session can end with a brief poem, which can act to complement or as a counterpoint to the prose. Participants can discuss it in the same way, if there’s time, or just let it sit with them. Either way, it feels like a good way to punctuate the end of a session. After participants leave, write up your observation notes immediately while the session is fresh: this is your most valuable data artefact.
The Details:
- Action: Close with a simple question: “Is there anything you want to say before we finish?” Allow the room to settle, then end warmly. After the session, write up observation notes covering: key quotes (as close to verbatim as possible), moments of visible emotional engagement, any participants who appeared to change their view or connect the text to their own life, the general energy and tone of the group, and any safeguarding notes. If participants made notes on their printed copies, collect them with permission as supplementary data.
- Tip: The observation notes written immediately after the session will contain things you did not consciously register during it. Write them before you check your phone or speak to anyone else. They are not a summary of the session: they are a raw data artefact. Treat them accordingly, date them, store them, and return to them when writing your evaluation report.
Part 2: Using This as an Evaluation Method
Choose Your Text With Your Outcomes in Mind
The text is not decoration: it is the data-collection instrument. Before you choose it, name the outcome you are trying to evidence. Wellbeing? Social connection? Empathy? Confidence? Then find a short piece of literature, prose or poetry, that puts a human being in the middle of that experience without spelling it out. A text about loneliness does not say “loneliness is bad.” It makes you feel it. That gap between what the text shows and what participants say about it is where your evaluation data lives.
Good Text Selection Looks Like
- A short extract (500 words or less) with a specific human situation at its centre
- Language that is vivid and particular, not generic or moralistic
- A text with no obvious “right” response, one that different people will understand differently
- Something chosen with this group in mind: their age, background, and what the programme has been exploring
What This Method Can Evidence
- Emotional engagement and empathy
- Social connection and confidence to speak in a group
- Wellbeing and sense of being heard
- Personal reflection and the ability to connect experience to meaning
Why It Works
- Stories provide psychological distance: Asking “how do you think this character is feeling?” creates safety. People begin by talking about the character then, slowly, begin talking about themselves.
- Neural coupling: When a story is read aloud, listeners’ brain activity synchronises with the reader’s in regions responsible for meaning, social understanding and emotional response.
Collecting the Data
You cannot pause a live shared reading session to fill in a form. Your data collection has to be built into the session itself, or happen immediately after it. Here are the four most practical options, from lightest to richest.
Your Four Data Collection Tools
- Marked-up printed copies. Ask participants to underline or circle anything that strikes them as they follow along. Collect the copies at the end with permission. These are physical artefacts showing exactly which words and passages landed.
- Co-facilitator observation notes. A second person in the room, freed from facilitating, can capture verbatim quotes and note who said what, when the room shifted, and where the energy changed. This is your richest source of live data.
- Post-session field notes. Written by the facilitator within 30 minutes of the session ending: key quotes, moments of visible engagement, anything unexpected. Do this before you check your phone.
- Audio recording. With consent, a recording gives you a complete record to return to. Most useful when you have time to review it and a clear coding framework: otherwise observation notes are faster and more practical.
Part 3: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
How the Mechanism produces specific, usable evaluation data.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Qualitative Live Spoken Responses |
Participants’ spontaneous, in-the-moment reactions to the text provide direct evidence of emotional engagement, empathy, and personal resonance. Because these are not prompted by evaluation questions, they are more authentic and harder to dismiss than survey responses. | Facilitator observation notes and verbatim quotes captured during and immediately after the session; audio recording with participant consent if appropriate; annotated printed texts returned by participants. |
| Behavioural Participation Patterns |
Who speaks, who listens, who laughs, who falls quiet: these observable patterns show levels of engagement that no tick-box can measure. Changes in participation patterns across repeated sessions provide evidence of growing confidence, trust, and social connection. | Facilitator observation notes recording who participated in each session, how they participated, and whether participation patterns changed over time; co-facilitator notes where available. |
| Testimonial Between-Session Reports |
Participants continuing to talk about a text days or weeks later, or family members reporting that a participant mentioned the reading group at home, is strong evidence of sustained impact. This is particularly significant for people living with dementia, for whom memory of any event is itself meaningful. | Reports from partner organisations (Dementia NI staff, library workers, carers) gathered informally or through a brief check-in at the start of each subsequent session; any unsolicited comments from participants about previous sessions. |
| Observational Text Interaction Artefacts |
Printed copies of texts that participants have marked, underlined, or annotated are physical evidence of engagement with specific passages. Participants who ask to keep their copy, or who take it home, are demonstrating impact through action, not self-report. | Annotated printed texts collected with permission at the end of sessions; facilitator notes recording any participant who asked to keep their copy or who referred back to the text during conversation. |
The data from shared reading is richer than almost anything a survey produces. Here is how to use it.
The Quote Wall
Your observation notes contain lines that no survey question would ever produce: spontaneous, specific, real. These are the most powerful evidence you have. A single line from a participant who has dementia, connecting a poem to a memory from their childhood, carries more weight in a funder report than a page of percentages.
The Participation Arc
Across a series of sessions, your observation notes tell a story about how the group changed. Who barely spoke in week one and had plenty to say by week four? Whose contributions shifted from surface (“I liked that”) to personal (“That reminded me of when…”)? That arc is impact.
The Unexpected Moment
Shared reading produces moments you did not plan for: a participant who reads aloud for the first time, someone who laughs at a line they recognise from their own life, a silence that holds the whole room. These moments are the most honest evidence of impact you will ever collect.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Shared Reading as Embedded Evaluation, we confirmed that participants in our community sessions demonstrated genuine emotional engagement, personal reflection, and social connection in real time, without a single survey form.”