Marketing Scoops: Helping Kids Slip The Surly Bonds of Leveled Reading

We often talk about the “reading wars” as if there were a single battle. In reality, it’s a multi-front conflict with several interlocking skirmishes. There’s the long-running dispute over whether early instruction must include systematic phonics (it must). There’s the debate over how much reading comprehension depends on content knowledge versus skills mastery (both are important, but content is king). There’s the question of the teacher’s role whether a “guide on the side” or a “sage on the stage,” to oversimplify it. And there’s the combustible argument over text selection: Should we teach from grade-level texts or match books to each student’s “instructional level”?…….Continue reading…..

By: Kathleen Porter-Magee

Source: Education Next

Critics:

Reading for pleasure has been linked to increased cognitive progress in vocabulary and mathematics during adolescence. Sustained high volume lifetime reading has been associated with high levels of academic attainment. Research suggests that reading can improve stress management, memory, focus, writing skills, and imagination. The cognitive benefits of reading continue into mid-life and the senior years.

Research suggests that reading books and writing are among the brain-stimulating activities that can slow down cognitive decline in seniors. Reading has been the subject of considerable research and reporting for decades. Many organizations measure and report on reading achievement for children and adults (e.g., NAEP, PIRLS, PISA PIAAC, and EQAO). Researchers have concluded that approximately 95% of students can be taught to read by the end of the first or second year of school, yet in many countries 20% or more do not meet that expectation.

A 2012 study in the U.S. found that 33% of grade three children had low reading scores – however, they comprised 63% of the children who did not graduate from high school. Poverty also had an additional negative impact on high school graduation rates. According to the 2019 Nation’s Report card, 34% of grade four students in the United States failed to perform at or above the Basic reading level. There was a significant difference by race and ethnicity (e.g., black students at 52% and white students at 23%).

After the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic the average basic reading score dropped by 3% in 2022. See more about the breakdown by ethnicity in 2019 and 2022 here. In 2022, 30% of grade eight students failed to perform at or above the NAEP Basic level, which was 3 points lower compared to 2019. According to a 2023 study in California, only 46.6% of grade three students achieved the English reading standards.

Another report states that many teenagers who’ve spent time in California’s juvenile detention facilities get high school diplomas with grade-school reading skills. “There are kids getting their high school diplomas who aren’t able to even read and write.” During a five-year span beginning in 2018, 85% of these students who graduated from high school did not pass a 12th-grade reading assessment. Children learn to speak naturally – by listening to other people speak.

However, reading is not a natural process, and many children need to learn to read through a process that involves “systematic guidance and feedback”. So, “reading to children is not the same as teaching children to read”. Nonetheless, reading to children is important because it socializes them to the activity of reading; it engages them; it expands their knowledge of spoken language; and it enriches their linguistic ability by hearing new and novel words and grammatical structures.

However, there is some evidence that “shared reading” with children does help to improve reading if the children’s attention is directed to the words on the page as they are being read to.There is robust evidence that saying a word out loud makes it more memorable than simply reading it silently or hearing someone else say it. This is because self-reference and self-control over speaking produce more engagement with the words. The memory benefit of “hearing oneself” is referred to as the production effect.

Some researchers report that teaching reading without teaching phonics is harmful to large numbers of students, yet not all phonics teaching programs produce effective results. The reason is that the effectiveness of a program depends on using the right curriculum together with the appropriate approach to instruction techniques, classroom management, grouping, and other factors.

Louisa Moats, a teacher, psychologist and researcher, has long advocated for reading instruction that is direct, explicit and systematic, covering phoneme awareness, decoding, comprehension, literature appreciation, and daily exposure to a variety of texts. She maintains that “reading failure can be prevented in all but a small percentage of children with serious learning disorders. It is possible to teach most students how to read if we start early and follow the significant body of research showing which practices are most effective”.

Interest in evidence-based education appears to be growing. In 2021, Best evidence encyclopedia (BEE) released a review of research on 51 different programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Many of the programs used phonics-based teaching and/or one or more of the following:

Cooperative learning, technology-supported adaptive instruction (see Educational technology), metacognitive skills, phonemic awareness, word reading, fluency, vocabulary, multisensory learning, spelling, guided reading, reading comprehension, word analysis, structured curriculum, and balanced literacy (non-phonetic approach).Evidence supports the strong synergy between reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding), especially for children in kindergarten or grade one and elementary school students at risk for literacy difficulties.

Students receiving encoding instruction and guided practice that included using (a) manipulatives such as letter tiles to learn phoneme-grapheme relationships and words and (b) writing phoneme-grapheme relationships and words made from these correspondences significantly outperformed contrast groups not receiving encoding instruction.

The reading workshop model provides students with a collection of books, allows them the choice of what to read, limits students’ reading to texts that can be easily read by them, provides teaching through mini-lessons, and monitors and supports reading comprehension development through one-on-one teacher-student conferences. Some reports state that it is ‘unlikely to lead to literacy success’ for all students, particularly those lacking foundational skills.

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The ability to read and write; knowledge or skills in a specific area, Oxford learner’s dictionary”.

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