Older students’ literacy problems (updated 2017)
- Details
- Hits: 53714
Older students’ literacy problems: Who are they?
Fourth grade slump, and more.
Dr Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Industry Fellow, School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
My blogs can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a Word file or PDF at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/olxpifutwcgvg8j/AABU8YNr4ZxiXPXzvHrrirR8a?dl=0
New addition - March 2025
You can find the original document at the end of this new section.
Overview
For struggling older students, reading interventions should focus on foundational skills like phonics and vocabulary, along with strategies to improve comprehension and fluency, such as graphic organizers, small group instruction, and personalized learning.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of effective reading interventions for struggling older students:
Foundational Skills:
- Phonics:
Re-teaching or reinforcing phonics skills can be crucial for older students, even if they seem to have mastered them earlier.
- Vocabulary:
Explicit vocabulary instruction, including pre-teaching key words and using context clues, is essential for comprehension.
- Fluency:
Improving reading speed and accuracy through strategies like repeated readings, choral reading, and reading aloud to a partner can boost confidence and comprehension.
Comprehension Strategies:
- Graphic Organizers:
Using graphic organizers to help students visualize and organize information from the text can improve comprehension.
- Small Group Instruction:
Providing individualized instruction in small groups allows teachers to address specific needs and learning gaps.
- Personalized Instruction:
Tailoring instruction to each student's unique learning style and needs is crucial for success.
- Rereading Difficult Passages:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Some Other Strategies:
- STARI:
The STARI program is designed to close the comprehension gap between struggling readers and their on-level peers, while also building reading confidence, stamina, and engagement.
- Cloze Activities:
Alter the process of reading from identifying printed words to using meaning for making sense by leaving the first few lines of the text intact and blanking out one of the words.
- Learning to Read for Older Students - Reading Teacher
To help older students restore foundational reading skills, parents and educators can utilize the following strategies: * Graphic...
readingteacher.com
- 10 Fluency strategies for struggling readers - Touch-Type Read and Spell
10 Strategies for fluency * Record students reading aloud on their own. ... * Ask kids to use a ruler or a reading window to foll...
Touch-type Read and Spell
- 5 Early Intervention Activities for Struggling Readers | Heinemann
12 May 2023 — To help struggling readers improve their fluency, read aloud to your students every day!
Heinemann Blog
See my old doc:
Older students' literacy problems (updated 2017)
National Institute for Direct Instruction
https://nifdi.org › news-latest-2 › blog-hempenstall › 407...
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Reading interventions for struggling older students:
Is it hard? What does it take? What focus? How intense: How frequent? What duration?
Josie Mingay: The dyslexia-friendly classroom
https://phonicsinternational.com › forum › viewtopic
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Teaching Reading to Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: An Observation Study
Abstract: Background
Growing evidence supports the efficacy of multicomponent, explicit, phonics-based reading instruction for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). However, little is known about the implementation of such instruction.
Aims
The purpose of this observation study was to describe the content and quality of reading instruction provided to kindergarten through third grade students with IDD in self-contained classrooms.
Methods and procedures
Researchers observed seven special education teachers and their seventeen students, examined teacher perspectives via survey and interview, and reviewed student Individualized Education Programs. Researchers coded 2,901 minutes of instruction for content, grouping, materials, instructional quality, engagement, and time spent reading connected text, using a tool adapted for the IDD population.
Outcomes
Observed instructional content focused on phonics/word study, followed by vocabulary and comprehension, then other areas. Within the already small classes, instruction was generally delivered individually or in small groups. Instructional quality and engagement varied by activity.
Conclusions and implications
Study findings suggest a need for greater systematic investigation of content and methods pertaining to reading instruction for students with IDD, instructional quality and engagement, and connections to student outcomes.
Esther R. Lindström, Christopher J. Lemons, Teaching Reading to Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: An Observation Study, Research in Developmental Disabilities, Volume 115, 2021, 103990, ISSN 0891-4222,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2021.103990.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891422221001396
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
AI Overview
Yes, scientifically based reading instruction is effective for older students, particularly those struggling with literacy, as it can help them acquire foundational skills and catch up to grade level.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
- The Science of Reading:
The "science of reading" refers to a body of research that identifies the critical principles for effective reading instruction, applicable to all ages, including older students.
- Focus on Foundational Skills:
For older students, this approach often focuses on addressing gaps in foundational skills like phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, which are crucial for reading comprehension.
- Explicit and Systematic Instruction:
Scientifically based instruction emphasizes explicit and systematic teaching of these skills, ensuring that students receive clear and structured instruction.
- Benefits for Struggling Readers:
Research shows that evidence-based interventions can lead to significant improvements in reading skills for struggling older readers, helping them to catch up to grade level.
- Examples of Effective Strategies:
- Systematic Synthetic Phonics: This method teaches the alphabetic code in a structured sequence, enabling students to blend sounds and read words.
- Vocabulary and Comprehension Instruction: Integrating vocabulary and comprehension instruction into content-area teaching is also effective.
- Fluency Training: Repeated reading of texts can improve reading speed and accuracy.
- Advanced Word Study: Intervention that focuses on word analysis and word recognition, versus recognizing and manipulating discrete letters and sounds, is sometimes called advanced word study.
- Importance of Professional Development:
Educators need a strong foundation of knowledge to teach reading properly, which is why access to high-quality professional learning is critical.
- How to Put Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction Into Action - Lexia
14 Aug 2024 — Moving to Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction Structured Literacy is the application of the science of reading. When ed...
Lexia
- Teaching Oral Reading Fluency to Older Students
6 Dec 2021 — Research on these techniques has found them to improve word reading, fluency, and reading comprehension. Whatever it is ...
Reading Rockets
- Introduction to the science of reading
25 Jan 2023 — The Simple View of Reading and the 5 Keys to Reading can also explain how reading develops for older students. Australian Education Research Organisation
Generative AI
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
When Older Students Can’t Read
By: Louisa Moats
https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/curriculum-and-instruction/articles/when-older-students-cant-read#:~:text=quickly%20as%20possible.-,Reading%20intervention,al.%2C%20in%20press).
These research-based reading strategies can build a foundation for reading success in students in third grade and beyond.
Breadcrumb
- Home
- Reading Topics A-Z
- Curriculum and Instruction
- When Older Students Can’t Read
“Since 1996, state and federal reading initiatives have focused on the problem of reading failure at kindergarten and the primary grades. The focus on early intervention is well-conceived, given the strong evidence that research-based instruction beginning in kindergarten significantly reduces the number of children who experience reading difficulty (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).
If children receive instruction in phonological and alphabetic skills and learn to apply that knowledge to decoding words, they are very likely to succeed at reading. Once children fall behind, they seldom catch up, a reason that such states as California, Virginia, and Texas promote early intervention to prevent reading problems. Reading level in 1st grade, moreover, is an astonishingly good predictor of reading achievement into high school (Catts et al., 1999; Cunningham and Stanovich, 1997; Shaywitz et al, 1999; Fletcher et al. 1994). Reading failure begins early, takes root quickly, and affects students for life.
Improvements in reading education in the lower elementary grades, however, are coming too slowly to affect the huge numbers of students beyond third grade who have been the victims of misguided reading instruction and scarce resources. Many people know that about 42 percent of 4th graders score below basic in overall reading skill on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In Washington, D.C., where I am currently studying reading intervention, the proportion of students beyond 3rd grade who cannot read well enough to participate in grade-level work is between 60 and 70 percent, depending on the grade and year of assessment. Too few children can compete in higher education and about half fail to complete high school. In this community, the rate of adult illiteracy — reading below 4th grade level — is 37%, the highest in the nation. Nationally, 25% of all adults are functionally illiterate.
The older struggling reader
What can be done? Plenty, if we are committed to applying best practices supported by reading research. Converging evidence from psychological studies of reading explains the nuts and bolts of learning to read at any age and in any alphabetic language ( Lyon, 1998). Most reading scientists agree that a core linguistic deficit underlies poor reading at all ages (Catts et al., 1999; Shaywitz et al., 1999). At any age, poor readers as a group exhibit weaknesses in phonological processing and word recognition speed and accuracy, as do younger poor readers (Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Shankweiler et al., 1995). At any age, when an individual’s reading comprehension is more impaired than his or her listening comprehension, inaccurate and slow word recognition is the most likely cause (Shankweiler et al., 1999).
To complicate matters, the older student has not practiced reading and avoids reading because reading is taxing, slow, and frustrating (Ackerman & Dyckman, 1996; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997). Therein lies the most challenging aspect of teaching older students: they cannot read so they do not like to read; reading is labored and unsatisfying so they have little reading experience; and, because they have not read much, they are not familiar with the vocabulary, sentence structure, text organization and concepts of academic “book” language. Over time, their comprehension skills decline because they do not read, and they also become poor spellers and poor writers. What usually begins as a core phonological and word recognition deficit, often associated with other language weaknesses, becomes a diffuse, debilitating problem with language — spoken and written.
Effective instruction
Several principles drive effective instruction in reading and language. Such instruction is intensive enough to close the ever-widening gap between poor readers and their grade-level peers as quickly as possible. Reading intervention grounded in research imparts to older readers the skills they missed in primary grades and can bring them to grade level in one to two years (Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Alexander & Conway, 1997; Torgesen et al., in press). The intervention must match the students’ level of reading development, because each stage of growth requires a special focus (Curtis & Longo, 1999).
Very poor readers must have their phonological skills strengthened because the inability to identify speech sounds erodes spelling, word recognition, and vocabulary development. For less severely impaired readers, educators must often target text reading fluency. If students can decipher words, educators must aggressively address vocabulary deficiencies with direct teaching and incentives to read challenging material in and out of school. If students do not know the words they are reading and cannot derive meaning from context, they must expand their vocabularies and learn a repertoire of comprehension strategies (Williams, 1998). Students cannot and should not bypass any critical skills necessary for fluent and meaningful reading just because of their chronological age.
Effective instruction stimulates language awareness. Language-deficient children often miss the subtle differences in speech sounds that distinguish words from one another (pacific/specific; goal/gold; fresh/flesh; anecdote/antidote; cot/caught). Direct work on speech sound identification pays off. If students cannot efficiently decode words by using phonic relationships, syllable patterns, and structural analysis (morphemes), they benefit from learning the organization of English orthography at various levels. If students are unfamiliar with the features of written text, such as subtitles, paragraph structures, connecting words and phrases, embedded clauses, idiomatic usages, and figures of speech, these can be taught. If students’ written sentences are short, incomplete, or stilted, they can learn sentence expansion and construction. Each of these challenges, moreover, can be met in age-appropriate ways, in inter-woven curricular strands that progress along a developmental sequence (Greene 1996).
Phonological Awareness and Decoding
Recognition of printed words depends on the ability to map speech sounds to letter symbols — the alphabetic principle — and to recognize letter sequences accurately and quickly — orthographic processing. The majority of poor readers who read below the 30th percentile in the intermediate and upper grades have either pronounced or residual needs for instruction in these basic skills. The techniques for teaching older students, however, differ from the techniques of teaching younger students.
Older students have experienced reading failure from an early age so they must be convinced that a renewed investment of energy will be worthwhile. In the Washington Literacy Council program, for example, adult students who have recently developed the ability to match speech sounds to letter symbols speak to incoming students about the helpfulness of the structured language instruction they are about to receive. Phonological awareness, decoding, spelling, grammar and other language skills can be taught as a linguistics course in which instructors use adult terminology such as “phoneme deletion&148; and “morphemic structure”. Phonemic drills are short tune-ups that include games such as reverse-a-word (Say teach; then say it with the first sound last and the last sound first-cheat.) Students identify speech sounds before they spell words by using the tapping technique — touching the thumb to successive fingers as they segment and pronounce the speech sounds ( Wilson, 1996).
Teachers can teach sound-symbol correspondences in the context of syllable types. Short vowels occur before one or more consonants in closed syllables. Students read the syllables and immediately spell them in longer, age-appropriate vocabulary: for example, fab, fabulous; pel, compel; com, accomplish. As they master six or seven syllable types, students learn to visually chunk sequences of letters and understand spelling patterns. For example, the word rifle has one f and the word ruffle has two fs because of the syllable structure. Rifle begins with an open syllable that ends with the long vowel (ri), and ruffle begins with a closed syllable (ruf); each syllable is attached to the final syllable unit -fle. To develop an eye for printed syllable units, students can arc under syllables with a pencil before reading a word.
As students’ syllable recognition and spelling progress, teachers can emphasize morphemes — prefixes, roots, and suffixes, mostly from Latin and Greek (Henry 1997). Beginning with inflections that may change the spelling of a base word (fine, finest; begin, beginning; study, studied), students analyze words into units that often link meaning and spelling — designate, signal, and assignment, for example, share a root). Instruction must be cumulative, sequential, and systematic, so that students overcome the bad habit of relying on context and guessing to decode unknown words.
Reading Fluency and Word Recognition
Sound-symbol associations and word recognition are usually fast and automatic in good readers - such readers employ little conscious attention when they identify words. Third graders typically read at more than 100 words per minute; adults typically read at more than 300 words per minute. Poor readers are usually too slow, even after they become accurate. Slowness generally reflects lack of practice with reading.
For some poor readers, slow word retrieval appears to be an unyielding, constitutional characteristic. These children do not easily develop whole word recognition, but instead decode each word as if it were seen for the first time. Older poor readers can usually increase speed with a great deal of practice at several levels: sound-symbol association, word reading, and text reading at an easy level. Quick speed drills, conducted as challenge games to achieve a goal, can build automatic recognition of syllables and morphemes. For example, students can graph their progress reading several lines of confusable syllables such as pre, pro, per or can, cane, kit, kite, pet, pete. (Fischer, 1999). Alternate oral reading of passages in small groups, reading with a tape-recording, choral reading of dramatic material, and rereading familiar text can all support text reading fluency. Above all, however, students must read as much as possible in text that is not too difficult in order to make up the huge gap between themselves and other students.
Vocabulary and Phrase Meanings
Normally progressing students can read most of the words in their listening vocabulary by 4th or 5th grade. From then on, they learn new vocabulary —primarily by reading— at the rate of several thousand new words per year. Older poor readers are at least partially familiar with more spoken words than they can read, but because they do not read well, their exposure to the words in varied contexts is limited. Students who are poor readers often have “heard of” a word, but lack depth, breadth, or specificity in word knowledge (Beck & McKeown, 1991). For example, one student of ours defined designated as sober, from the association with designated driver. Many poor readers must overcome a huge vocabulary deficit before they will be able to read successfully beyond the 5th grade level.
Effective vocabulary study occurs daily and involves more than memorizing definitions. Teachers deliberately use new words as often as possible in classroom conversation. They reward students for using new words or for noticing use of the words outside of the class. Such strategies as using context to derive meanings, finding root morphemes, mapping word derivations, understanding word origins, and paraphrasing idiomatic or special uses for words are all productive. If possible, word study should be linked to subject matter content and literature taught in class, even if the literature is being read aloud to the students.
Teaching Comprehension
Increasing emphasis on more advanced reading strategies is appropriate as students reach the 4th or 5th grade level of reading ability. Students who have not read a great deal often lag in their knowledge of genre, text structure, text organization, and literary devices. They are unused to reading for information, or reading to grapple with the deeper meanings of a text. The internal questioning that occurs in the mind of a good reader must be explicated, modeled, and practiced many times in group discussions. Probing and using open-ended questions about issues significant to the students are most likely to stimulate language. Great texts such as fables, poems, oral histories, and adapted classics promote student engagement. Even if students are working on word recognition, they will benefit from daily opportunities to discuss meaningful material.
The teacher of comprehension must simultaneously teach students about sentence structure, text cohesion, punctuation, phrasing, and grammar because comprehension can break down at the most basic levels of language processing. For example, students who are poor readers may fail to identify the referent for a pronoun, the figurative use of a word, the significance of a logical connective, or the tone of a phrase.
Written Response to Reading
Written response to reading can greatly enhance comprehension, but poor readers must have their writing skills developed sequentially and cumulatively. Writing improves when students practice answering specific question types, elaborating subjects and predicates, combining simple sentences, constructing clauses, and linking sentences into organized paragraphs. These are the building blocks of clear expository writing.
Even as students develop the building blocks for writing, shared and modeled writing helps them transcend the daunting challenges of generating and organizing their thoughts. Rather than turning students loose to face a blank piece of paper, the instructor models and demystifies the composition process. First, the class generates and sorts ideas. Then it decides on an outline and topic sentence. Next, the teacher talks the class through each step of a shared composition, modeling decisions about what and how to write. Finally, the teacher models the editing process, pointing out sentences that need elaboration, combination, or reordering, and replaces words as necessary. Students are thus prepared to compose independently.
Instruction that works
Older poor readers can often learn to read with appropriate instruction. Joseph Torgesen and his colleagues at Florida State University have brought very poor readers at grades 3 to 5 up to grade level and documented the maintenance of those gains over two years (Torgesen et al., in press). Students in Torgesen’s study received instruction for two hours each day for a total of 80 hours. Two approaches, varying in amount of time spent on decoding and text reading, proved effective.
In Sacramento and Elk Grove, California, several schools have achieved significant gains with 6th through 10th graders using Jane Greene’s LANGUAGE! curriculum with classes of nonreaders and very poor readers. Mary Beth Curtis and Anne Marie Longo, at the Boys Town Reading Center in Nebraska, report strong efficacy data for their program based on stages of reading development.
All of these approaches assume that older poor readers can learn to read if they are taught the foundation language skills they missed and they have ample opportunity to apply the skills in meaningful text reading. Each approach teaches language structure explicitly to match the developmental needs of the students and uses systematic, structured, and cumulative methods applied to age-appropriate text. These approaches teach language at all levels: sound, word, sentence, and passage. They unpack the building blocks of words, ensuring that students process them accurately, build fluency through ample practice, and teach students to engage actively the meanings in text.
Beyond 3rd grade, poor readers can be taught if the program has all necessary components, the teacher is well prepared and supported, and the students are given time, sufficiently intensive instruction, and incentives to overcome their reading and language challenges. Given the right approach, students will buy in. In fact, they’ll ask why they were allowed to go so far without being taught to read.”
About the Author
Dr. Louisa Moats is a nationally recognized authority on how children learn to read and why some struggle to learn. Widely acclaimed as a researcher, speaker, consultant, and trainer, Moats has developed the landmark professional development program LETRS for teachers and reading specialists.
Related Topics
Curriculum and Instruction, Fluency, Learning Disabilities, Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, Phonics and Decoding, Vocabulary
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
Phonological Instruction for Older Students
By: Louisa Moats, Carol Tolman
Additional and explicit instruction in phonological awareness is a critical component in helping fourth grade readers who struggle with phonological deficits. The exercises can be used as a warm-up prior to reading, spelling, or vocabulary instruction.
Breadcrumb
- Home
- Reading Topics A-Z
- Phonological and Phonemic Awareness
- Phonological Instruction for Older Students
“Instruction that enhances awareness of speech sounds is relevant for older students who are inattentive to the internal details of spoken words. These students may show all the symptoms listed for younger students, including poor spelling, inaccurate decoding of new words, mispronunciation of words, and difficulty remembering or recalling new words. Direct teaching with a vowel chart and a consonant chart is quite possible with students at fourth grade and up, and many can improve substantially in PA with structured practice.
The phonological awareness strand of a well-designed reading or language lesson for older students includes brief, direct practice of specific skills such as syllabication or phoneme segmentation, often as a warm-up exercise before reading, spelling, or vocabulary instruction begins. In addition, these teaching activities and adjustments can be helpful:
- Ask students to recognize whether words have been pronounced correctly.
- Ask students to watch you as you pronounce new words or new names.
- Ask students to say vocabulary words aloud and to pronounce them correctly.
- Highlight, describe, segment, and pronounce individual speech sounds if similar sounding words are confused
(e.g., flush/flesh/fresh; entomologist/etymologist; gorilla/guerilla). - Use a guide word or gesture to remind students of a sound’s identity, especially short vowels.
- Segment syllables and/or speech sounds before spelling words or to correct misspellings.
- Orally rehearse the repetition of phrases and sentences that are being written, to reduce the load on working memory.
- Write and talk when explanations are given; reduce the load on working memory.
- Provide written, pictorial, or graphic support when spoken language must be processed.
Phonological processing is an umbrella term that encompasses many abilities having to do with speech perception and production; phoneme awareness; and memory, retrieval, and naming functions. In part, it accounts for how well an individual learns new words, pronounces words, learns a foreign language, recalls names and facts, and spells. Phonological awareness is a metalinguistic proficiency that includes the ability to divide a word into spoken syllables, onset-rime segments, and individual phonemes. Phoneme awareness is the component skill of phonological processing that is most closely related to reading and spelling. Learning to decode an alphabetic writing system with phonics requires phoneme awareness.
Speech sounds are divided into consonants and vowels. Each speech sound is distinguished by a set of features, such as oral or nasal, stopped or continuous, voiced or unvoiced, and aspirated or unaspirated production.
Speech sounds that are similar in place and manner of articulation are the most easily confused. If young students are left on their own to figure out the identity of speech sounds in words, they may not be able to detect all the features that distinguish those sounds. Speech sounds are not articulated separately; they are coarticulated when we speak, and thus, many people have some difficulty segmenting the sounds. Direct teaching is important because it enables students to form accurate concepts of speech sounds that will anchor their learning of vocabulary words and the writing system.”
About the Author
Dr. Louisa Moats is a nationally recognized authority on how children learn to read and why some struggle to learn. Widely acclaimed as a researcher, speaker, consultant, and trainer, Moats has developed the landmark professional development program LETRS for teachers and reading specialists.
Citation
Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
4 Ways Teachers Identify and Support Struggling Older Readers (opens in a new window
Education Week March 18, 2025
“On March 13, Education Week hosted a panel of middle and high school educators who are focused on supporting students who struggle. They discussed how to find the students who need support, what works to catch them up, and how to make time for this instruction during the school day. Read on for four highlights from the conversation, and insights from other upper elementary and middle school educators who spoke with Education Week.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Handwriting Helps Kids Learn. Here’s How to Make the Most of It. (opens in a new window)
KQED Mindshift
March 12, 2025
“In an age where screens dominate classrooms and workplaces, handwriting might seem like a relic of the past. But research shows that putting pen to paper plays a crucial role in literacy development. “I can’t talk about handwriting without talking about reading and spelling—they’re integrated. In our brains, the networks are connected,” said Dr. Nancy Cushen White, a language therapist and educator who has worked with students of all ages, including adults, to develop writing skills. Handwriting is more than just a motor skill, White explained. Research shows writing by hand leads to better recognition and understanding of letters. It also improves memory and recall of words.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
We are just beginning the uphill climb to improve student reading scores (opens in a new window)
eSchool News March 11, 2025
“The solution to low reading scores is a complicated one, requiring focused attention and action. There are still many levers that need to be pulled before we are ALL rowing in the same direction. There are institutions of higher education in which teachers are not learning instructional practices aligned with the research. There are balanced literacy and whole-language instructional resources that dominate the market. While there is legislation, it may be too new, too vague, or lacking accountability to really measure the impact. Leadership, community, targeted funding are all areas which need our attention.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Edutopia March 25, 2025
“Classroom support strategies are often labeled as “special interventions” and compliance-driven tasks for a select few. But that’s an oversimplification. Tools like speech-to-text, guided notes, and flexible deadlines aren’t optional add-ons and isolated fixes—they’re essential supports that can boost learning for everyone. By shifting away from language and labels that tend to separate students, educators can help eliminate learning-related stigmas. And it helps create an environment where special education and general education teachers are able to collaborate more effectively. Here are a number of strategies that are intended to encourage deeper communication and collaboration between special education and general education teachers, in service of integrating meaningful, inclusive practices into everyday learning.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
How Teachers Can Judge the Credibility of Research (opens in a new window)
Education Week (subscription)
March 25, 2025
“We teachers are bombarded with “research-backed” this or “evidence-supported” that. Maybe we have the time to read it and maybe we don’t. But what are the questions we should be asking about it? Today’s post is the second in a three-part series (see Part One here) offering a checklist that teachers can use to judge the credibility of the research behind the actions we are being told we should take in the classroom.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Scholar Douglas Harris Debuts New ‘Wikipedia’ of K–12 Research (opens in a new window)
The 74 (2025)
“The program is a unique example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school
“The actions of the Trump administration over the last few months could make it vastly more difficult to understand what’s actually happening in schools. Ironically, those worries emerged just as the Association for Education Finance and Policy unveiled a critical new tool: its Live Handbook of education policy research, gathering and distilling the findings of thousands of studies. Its 50 chapters address a bevy of questions ranging from preschool to higher education, including the makeup of local school boards, performance of charters and school vouchers, teacher preparation programs, the effects of education spending, and more. The Association hopes the extensive and growing site, an update of previous printed versions, can provide educators and lawmakers alike with something akin to a Wikipedia for research.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Reading Comprehension Teaching Has Improved—But Not Nearly Enough (opens in a new window)
Education Week 2025
“Comprehension strategy instruction has a solid research base. Teacher guides on evidence-based practices from the What Works Clearinghouse recommend teaching students across grade levels how to use these strategies—steps such as monitoring their own understanding as they read, or visualizing what’s happening in a story. Over the past decade, though, another approach has gained traction: using curricula that explicitly builds children’s knowledge about the world through social studies and science content, in attempts to help them unlock more meaning from the texts they’re reading. Research shows that students with more world knowledge understand texts better, though there’s less evidence for the effectiveness of specific curricula. Some experts in the field say schools shouldn’t take an either-or approach.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Opinion: For the DCPS Reading Clinic, every month is National Reading Month (opens in a new window)
K-12 Dive 2025
“The DC Reading Clinic has already provided quality structured literacy to over 500 teachers and more trainings are planned, writes Chancellor Ferebee. As the education sector across the country grapples with greater needs and tightening resources, the DC Reading Clinic’s commitment to providing free, high-quality literacy support is both rare and invaluable. The clinic’s success can serve as a model for other cities. By investing in our teachers and most vulnerable readers, DCPS is helping to create a future where every child becomes a fluent, lifelong reader.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools (opens in a new window)
National Public Radio 2025
“The administration has promised that “formula funding” for schools, which is protected by law, would be preserved. That includes flagship programs like Title I for high-poverty schools, and the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP), which sends money to rural and low-income schools. But nearly all the statisticians and data experts who work in the office responsible for determining whether schools qualify for that money will soon be out of jobs, making it unclear how such grants would remain intact.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
School Library Journal 2025
“The Evanston Public Library has named The Great Lakes: our Freshwater Treasure, written by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Jamey Christoph, published by Penguin Random House as the winner of the fourth annual Blueberry Awards. The Blueberry Awards honor children’s literature that strengthens kids’ connections with nature and fosters action for the planet.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
10 ways COVID changed American schools (opens in a new window)
Chalkbeat 2025
“Student academic performance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Inequality has grown, with students in more affluent school districts largely back to normal — academically at least — and those in high-poverty communities still struggling. With the pivot to remote learning, technology is now everywhere in American schools, but a new digital divide has opened up between those filling out worksheets on Chromebooks and those learning how to use generative AI. Divisions over school closures and COVID safety protocols turned schools into political war zones and fueled the rise of the conservative parents’ rights movement.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Cultivating Speaking and Listening Skills in the Primary Grades (opens in a new window)
Edutopia 2025
“There are many engaging and effective strategies to develop interpersonal skills, and most are easy to incorporate into daily classroom routines. This teacher uses these strategies to directly teach, model, and practice these essential communication skills at a developmentally appropriate level: turn-taking, small group speaking and listening, whole group speaking and listening, and accountable talk.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The 74 2025
“The program is a unique example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school — a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Latest Executive Orders Seeks to Eliminate the IMLS (opens in a new window)
School Library Journal 2025
“The executive orders (EO) and slashing of federal services have come for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The elimination of the agency would not only be a devastating and possibly fatal blow to state and local public libraries, the loss of the IMLS would negatively impact school libraries. School librarians use IMLS grant programs, such as the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, to provide better services and support for their students, in addition to other efforts. An IMLS grant is currently the funding source of an effort to return school librarians to Philadelphia’s public schools.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Training the next generation of Science of Reading educators (opens in a new window)
Amplify 2025
“Dr. Amy Murdoch, assistant dean of reading science in the School of Education at Mount St. Joseph University, talks about creating prominent graduate and doctoral programs in the Science of Reading, and the responsibility of training the next generation of early literacy educators. She discusses how she has seen Science of Reading interest escalate, shares her hopes for the future of reading science in schools, and offers advice for those who are new to the Science of Reading and/or exploring an advanced degree rooted in reading science.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
What will NCES layoffs mean for the Nation’s Report Card? (opens in a new window)
K-12 Dive 2025
“The Trump administration has all but axed the U.S. Department of Education’s statistical research arm — the National Center for Education Statistics — sparing only a handful of employees who are left without department staff needed to analyze education data. Now, those caught in the latest wave of the administration’s cuts are warning that their haphazard nature will lead to a decline in the quality of assessments and data overseen by NCES.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
How Far Have We Come in Supporting Children’s Reading Comprehension? (opens in a new window)
Harvard Graduate School of Education 2025
“A new paper finds “substantial gap persists” between reading comprehension research and practice, calls for greater efforts to prioritize effective instruction methods. Reading comprehension support should be available throughout the school day and across the curriculum, according to assistant professor and study lead Phil Capin. “The Common Core state standards specify that reading comprehension is an important goal in English language arts instruction, but it’s also an important goal in social studies, in science and in math, particularly as it relates to word problems,” he said.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
How to Structure Lessons to Build Reading and Writing Skills (opens in a new window)
Education Week 2025
“Reading and writing are so intertwined that instruction in one is bound to benefit the other. HIn this video, Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy education at Virginia Tech, offers actionable tips for teachers on ways to intentionally incorporate both disciplines into their lessons.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
4 Ways Teachers Identify and Support Struggling Older Readers (opens in a new window)
Education Week 2025
“On March 13, Education Week hosted a panel of middle and high school educators who are focused on supporting students who struggle. They discussed how to find the students who need support, what works to catch them up, and how to make time for this instruction during the school day. Read on for four highlights from the conversation, and insights from other upper elementary and middle school educators who spoke with Education Week.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Navigating How and When to Use Tech When Teaching Young Children (opens in a new window)
New America 2025
“In January and February, New America’s Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) program and Early and Elementary Education policy program partnered to host a two-part webinar series, helping educators, policymakers, and parents navigate the latest guidance. Researchers, pediatricians, media specialists, and early childhood educators gathered to discuss the evidence and everyday decisions around how technology should be used with children between pre-K and third grade, which types and amounts are appropriate, and whether various forms should be used at all.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Cultivating a Habit of Reading in Elementary School (opens in a new window)
Edutopia 2025
“Teachers can use these simple strategies to encourage a lifelong love of reading in students: sharing about reading and scheduling reading time and “book shopping” time. As an educator who loves creating a spark in my students’ reading time, I know the importance of building positive reading habits by connecting students to meaningful book choices. Exploring new genres will help build enthusiasm and increase reading engagement for our students, helping to ensure that reading becomes a lifelong habit.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Tips for Helping Kids Manage Emotions When They’re Intense and Difficult (opens in a new window)
KQED Mindshift 2025
“In his new book, “Shift: Managing Your Emotions – So They Don’t Manage You,” neuroscientist Ethan Kross shares the most current research on emotional regulation. He also offers a perspective on the functions of emotion and advises us against suppressing challenging emotions. Instead, he says to notice when their intensity or duration are doing you or your child more harm than good, and continue to gather an array of tools for shifting emotions out of high gear.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
What the Alluring ‘She-Wolf’ of Brazilian Literature Wanted Kids to See (opens in a new window)
The New York Times (gift article) 2025
“In her children’s stories, Clarice Lispector disguised philosophical questions in cheerful, kooky fables about exuberant animals with places to be.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
National Public Radio 2025
“Five years after the pandemic first closed the nation’s schools, national test scores show students backsliding in reading all over the United States. There was one exception: Louisiana. In 2019, Louisiana’s fourth graders ranked 50th in the country for reading. Now, they’ve risen to 16th. According to an even more granular analysis, Louisiana is the only state that has not only made a “full recovery” from the pandemic in both math and reading, but has improved upon its reading scores since 2019. So what’s in Louisiana’s secret sauce? We went to Natchitoches Parish School District to find out: It’s one of Louisiana’s poorest school districts, up against some of the biggest hurdles to student achievement, yet it has managed to quickly grow its reading scores.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Education Week 2025
“The seismic dismissal of employees at the U.S. Department of Education this week represents a “first step” toward abolishing the federal agency, Education Secretary Linda McMahon confirmed. The slashes further diminish the department’s capacity to carry out its key functions of funding and disseminating research, enforcing the nation’s school accountability laws, investigating discrimination claims and bringing schools into compliance with anti-discrimination statutes, and more. Some of the heaviest cuts will hit the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences—which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress and statistics-gathering and dissemination through the National Center for Education Statistics.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Applying Literacy Standards Across Content Areas (opens in a new window)
+Edutopia 2025
“Teaching literacy—reading, writing, speaking, and listening—was long thought of as the job of the English department, and if students weren’t considered proficient, it was that department’s fault. Thankfully, that mindset has changed. It is our responsibility, whether you’re a classroom teacher, a paraprofessional, or an educational assistant, to give all of our students literacy opportunities in every discipline. To begin that process, determine a set of guidelines that outline what you want your students to know and be able to do in terms of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Disability Scoop 2025
“The U.S. Department of Education is firing almost 1,400 employees raising questions about how the federal government will uphold its obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other laws. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has outlined plans to return control over education to the states. She has proposed moving oversight of IDEA to the Department of Health and Human Services and sending the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which handles complaints of disability discrimination in schools, to the Department of Justice. Disability advocates have been warning that efforts to dismantle the Education Department could have an outsized impact on the nation’s 7.5 million special education students.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
8 Hands-On STEAM Projects Your Students Will Enjoy (opens in a new window)
Edutopia 2025
“STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) fosters curiosity, problem-solving, and creativity. While integrating STEAM into your classroom can seem challenging due to tight schedules and budgets, simple hands-on projects can significantly enhance learning. These elementary activities easily integrate into your existing curriculum, boosting students’ creativity and critical thinking without taking up all of your time.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Education Department Fires 1,300 Workers, Gutting Its Staff (opens in a new window)
The New York Times 2025
“The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools. The cuts could portend an additional move by Mr. Trump to essentially dismantle the department, as he has said he wants to do, even though it cannot be closed without the approval of Congress.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Handwriting Helps Kids Learn. Here’s How to Make the Most of It. (opens in a new window)
KQED Mindshift 2025
“In an age where screens dominate classrooms and workplaces, handwriting might seem like a relic of the past. But research shows that putting pen to paper plays a crucial role in literacy development. “I can’t talk about handwriting without talking about reading and spelling—they’re integrated. In our brains, the networks are connected,” said Dr. Nancy Cushen White, a language therapist and educator who has worked with students of all ages, including adults, to develop writing skills. Handwriting is more than just a motor skill, White explained. Research shows writing by hand leads to better recognition and understanding of letters. It also improves memory and recall of words.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
‘A Revolution in the Nursery’: Celebrating 80 Years of Pippi Longstocking (opens in a new window)
Publishers Weekly 2025
“On March 7, the Swedish residence in New York City opened its doors to librarians and other members of the children’s book community for a gathering in honor of International Women’s Day and the 80th book birthday of the strongest girl in the world: Pippi Longstocking. The event was held in partnership with the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and Astrid Lindgren Company, PEN America, and the Swedish Institute. Children’s literature historian Leonard S. Marcus led a panel on the enduring relevance and resonance of the Pippi Longstocking books.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
We are just beginning the uphill climb to improve student reading scores (opens in a new window)
eSchool News, 2025
“The solution to low reading scores is a complicated one, requiring focused attention and action. There are still many levers that need to be pulled before we are ALL rowing in the same direction. There are institutions of higher education in which teachers are not learning instructional practices aligned with the research. There are balanced literacy and whole-language instructional resources that dominate the market. While there is legislation, it may be too new, too vague, or lacking accountability to really measure the impact. Leadership, community, targeted funding are all areas which need our attention.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Flypaper (Fordham Institute) 2025
“Why are teachers still hunched over laptops, crafting lessons from scratch or scouring Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers for curriculum materials? The work of Oregon professor Siegfried Engelmann (co-creator of Direct Instruction) illustrates why DIY lesson planning and worshiping to excess at the altar of “student engagement” doesn’t cut it. There are three good reasons that teachers shouldn’t be stuck doing it: they aren’t trained for it, they don’t have time for it, and the task itself—complex and interdependent—demands far more than a single teacher can reasonably deliver, or be expected”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Using Theater Games and Activities as Brain Breaks (opens in a new window)
Edutopia 2025
“Theater games and activities make great brain breaks for preschool and elementary students—short tasks or activities that redirect their focus and can help with transitions in the classroom. Theater games and activities use movement, creative expression, and pretend and are perfect for preschool and early elementary students.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Why Is Teaching Reading Comprehension Such a Big Challenge? (opens in a new window)
KQED Mindshift 2025
“Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s relatively good evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read. That should mean substantial progress toward fixing a problem identified decades ago. But a paper published in a 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Studies of Reading shows that hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
There is proof that knowledge works. And it’s overwhelming. (opens in a new window)
Flypaper (Fordham Institute) 2025
“Contrary to the claim that there’s never been a study, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking synthesizes a wealth of evidence supporting the role of knowledge in learning. The book argues for a coherent curriculum that systematically builds students’ background knowledge to facilitate deeper understanding and better reading comprehension. This aligns with decades of research in cognitive science demonstrating that comprehension is not a transferable skill but is largely dependent on prior knowledge.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Spellcheck Won’t Cut It. Here’s Why Kids Need Spelling Instruction (opens in a new window)
Education Week (subscription) 2025
“Even as “science of reading” mandates sweep across the country, requiring schools to use evidence-based methods for teaching young students how to read, spelling rarely is mentioned in the conversation. Some skeptics of spelling instruction cite the advent of spellcheck technologies, including artificial intelligence, as proof that students no longer need to know how to spell. But literacy experts ardently disagree. “Spelling is a highly accurate window into children’s understanding of language and literacy,” said Molly Ness, a reading researcher and teacher-educator at City University of New York, Brooklyn College. “It’s so predictive of their understanding of how words work and the synchrony of spelling, vocabulary, and word knowledge.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Explicit instruction: Students need more of it (opens in a new window)
Chalkbeat New York 2025
“As a progressive educator in New York City for 30 years, I thought I had all the answers. The best teaching had to do with inquiry, with “higher-level thinking,” with “student-centered” project-based learning. I still believe in all of that, but I now understand that these are just part of the picture. What students — especially struggling students — also need is teacher-directed explicit instruction. By explicit instruction, I am speaking of the “I-do, we-do, you-do” strategy, where the teacher models a concept or skill, engages students in targeted practice, checks and corrects understanding, and then gives students more independent practice, with more checking for understanding and corrective feedback.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Reading Skills Are in Sharp Decline. Rescuing Them Won’t be Easy. (opens in a new window)
Ed Surge 2025
“Dolores Perez started tutoring students around the time the COVID-19 vaccine made it safe to meet in-person. What started as a part-time gig for a couple of students in 2021 now keeps her busy six days a week. When it comes to the youngest students she tutors, those in kindergarten through fourth grade, Perez says they all need help with reading. It’s not their fault, she says, or their parents’ or even the schools’ fault. It’s just what happened during the early days of the pandemic, when kids were stuck at home and beaming into school through a computer.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Stanford Report 2025
“Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) such as autism and Down syndrome are often left behind when it comes to literacy instruction – casualties of the misperception that at best, they could only read by learning to recognize common words by sight. But researchers are finding that students with IDD, like their peers without disabilities, can benefit from a more complex approach, including phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Researchers Created a Phonics Program With ‘Dramatic’ Results. How It Works (opens in a new window)
Education Week 2025
“A new study has found evidence of big gains in students’ reading ability from using one specific phonics program—and suggests that consistent implementation is key to getting the strongest results. The foundational-skills curriculum, UFLI Foundations, was created by researchers at the University of Florida Literacy Institute. When kindergarten and 1st grade teachers in one Florida district used the program for a year, their students grew at a much faster rate than similar students in other classrooms in the district that continued business-as-usual reading instruction. Teachers who followed the program more closely saw better results than those who didn’t teach lessons in the recommended sequence, or with all of the listed steps.
Ackerman, P.T. & Dykman, R.A. (1996). The speed factor and learning disabilities: The toll of slowness in adolescents. Dyslexia, 2, 1-21.
Beck, I.L., & McKeown, M.G. (1991). Conditions of vocabulary acquisition. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, and P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. II (pp. 789-814). White Plains, NY: Longman.
Catts, H.W., Fey, M.E., Zhang, X., & Tomblin, J.B. (1999). Language basis of reading and reading disabilities: Evidence from a longitudinal investigation. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 331-361.
Cunningham, A.E. & Stanovich, K.E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33, 934-945.
Curtis, M.E. & Longo, A.M. (1999). When adolescents can’t read: Methods and materials that work. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
Fischer, P. (1999). Concept Phonics: Objectives and Activities, levels One and Two. Farmington, ME: Oxton House Publishers.
Greene, J.F. (1996). LANGUAGE!: The effects of an individualized structured language curriculum for middle and high school students. Annals of Dyslexia, 38, 258-275.
Henry, M. (1997). The decoding/spelling continuum: Integrated decoding and spelling instruction from pre-school to early secondary school. Dyslexia, 3, 178-189.
Lyon, G. R. (1998). Why reading is not a natural process. Educational Leadership, 55 (6), 14-18.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Washington, DC: NICHD. (1-800-370-2943)
Shankweiler, D., Crane, S. Katz, L., Fowler, A.E., Liberman, A.M., Brady, S.A., Thornton, R., Lindquist, E., Dreyer, L., Fletcher, J.M., Stuebing, K.K., Shaywitz, S.E, & Shaywitz, B.A. (1995). Cognitive profiles of reading-disabled children: Comparison of language skills in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Psychological Science, 6, 149-56.
Shankweiler, D., Lundquist, E., Dreyer, L.G. & Dickinson, C.C. (1996). Reading and spelling difficulties in high school students: Causes and consequences. Reading and Writing: An interdisciplinary journal, 8, 267-294.
Shankweiler, D., Lundquist, E., Katz, L., Stuebing, K.K., Fletcher, J.M., Brady, S., Fowler, A., Dreyer, L.G., Marchione, K.E., Shaywitz, S.E., & Shaywitz, B.A. (1999). Comprehension and decoding: Patterns of association in children with reading difficulties. Scientific Studies of Reading, 31, 69-94.
Shaywitz, S.E., Fletcher, J.M., Holahan, J.M., Shneider, A.E., Marchione, K.E., Stuebing, K.K., Francis, D.J., Pugh, K.R., & Shaywitz, B.A. (1999).
Persistence of dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence. Pediatrics, 104 (6), 1351-1359.Stanovich, K. & Siegel, L. (1994).
The phenotypic profile of reading-disabled children: A regression-based test of the phonological-core variable difference model. Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 24-53.
Torgesen, J.K., Alexander, A.W., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Voeller, K., & Conway, T. (in press). Intensive remedial instruction for children with severe reading disabilities: Immediate and long-term outcomes from two instructional approaches. Journal of Learning Disabilities.
Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C. A., Alexander, A.W., & Conway, T. (1997). Preventive and remedial interventions for children with severe reading disabilities. Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8, 51-61.
Williams, J. (1998). Improving the comprehension of disabled readers. Annals of Dyslexia, 48, 213-238.
Wilson, B. (1996). Wilson Reading System, Instructor Manual (3rd Ed). Willbury, MA: Wilson Language Training Corporation.
End of:
Older students’ literacy problems: Who are they? Fourth grade slump, and more.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
This next segment is the original, broader document and includes earlier periods.
Reading interventions for struggling older students:
Is it hard? What does it take? What focus? How intense: How frequent? What duration? What's treatment fidelity?
What will I get for all the effort? How many will still make little progress?
Who are they?
“Older struggling readers fall into a wide range of developmental levels, presenting a unique set of circumstances not found in younger more homogeneous beginning readers (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). These struggling adolescents readers generally belong to one of two categories, those provided with little or poor early reading instruction or those possibly provided with good early reading instruction, yet for unknown reasons were unable to acquire reading skills (Roberts, Torgesen, Boardman, & Sammacca, 2008). Additionally within these two categories, older struggling readers are extremely heterogeneous and complex in their remediation needs (Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2007; Torgesen et al., 2007)” (p.566).
Calhoon, M. B., & Prescher, Y. (2013). Individual and group sensitivity to remedial reading program design: Examining reading gains across three middle school reading projects. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 26, 565-592.
Fourth Grade Slump
Under the meaning centred approach to reading development, there is no systematic attention to ensuring children develop the alphabetic principle. Decoding is viewed as only one of several means of ascertaining the identity of a word – and it is denigrated as being the least effective identification method (behind contextual cues). In the early school years, books usually employ highly predictable language and usually offer pictures to aid word identification. This combination can provide an appearance of early literacy progress. The hope in this approach is that this form of multi-cue reading will beget skilled reading.
However, the problem of decoding unfamiliar words is merely postponed by such attractive crutches. It is anticipated in the meaning centred approach that a self-directed attention to word similarities will provide a generative strategy for these students. However, such expectations are all too frequently dashed – for many at-risk children progress comes to an abrupt halt around Year 3 or 4 when an overwhelming number of unfamiliar (in written form) words are rapidly introduced. This apparent stalling of progress became known as the fourth grade slump (Chall & Jacobs, 1983; Hirsch, 2003). The number of words a child requires to cope with grade level text in Year 2 was estimated by Carnine (1982) as between three and four hundred, and in Years 3 and 4 between three and four thousand. Share (1995) estimated that the average fifth year student encounters about ten thousand new words – an “orthographic avalanche” that overwhelms most of those without adequate decoding skills.
Strategies that rely upon memory-for-shapes of words, or picture-clues, or context-clues become unproductive (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1994). This leaves a dependence largely on the students’ visual-recognition store of word shapes, and students too often have not developed any generative strategy for the decoding of these novel words. It is true that some children develop a working understanding of the alphabetic principle despite the absence of explicit instruction; however, those students who did not have the ‘Aha!’ experience tended to be left floundering without the structure necessary to progress (National Reading Panel, 2000). This circumstance often becomes apparent during fourth grade (though with appropriate assessment, the problem could have been uncovered in the first grade).
In the RMIT Psychology Clinic, I’ve lost count of the number of parents seeking assistance for their fourth grade child have lamented. “We often wondered if Jane’s reading progress was OK, but we were assured when we enquired each year that she was doing fine. Now this year’s report states that she’s way behind. How can this be?”
Upcoming Events
Search Our Site
Latest News
Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy
Designed and Maintained by Shockoe Studios