National Reading and Math Scores Remain Stagnant

This week’s article summary is National Reading and Math Scores Haven't Budged in a Decade.

It’s probably not surprising that both reading and math standardized test results haven’t improved very much over the years, even when discounting Covid-19’s impact on student learning.

From my vantage point, these stagnant scores result from how America teaches reading and math.

As an article summary earlier this year pointed out, students who lack wide content knowledge typically struggle with reading comprehension: the more you know about the subject, the easier it is to understand readings about it.

Another article captures the dilemma of stagnant reading scores: “There are two essential components of reading comprehension: decoding ability and language comprehension. If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands—he won't be able to understand what's on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn't have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won't be able to understand the words he can say out loud. Are students struggling on these tests to decode the words, or are students decoding words well, but lacking the background knowledge and vocabulary to know what they mean? Or is it some combination of both? Tests measure comprehension, not its components.”

Over the past few years, most schools have recommitted to emphasizing phonics and decoding, so my guess is the moribund test scores are more a result of not enough exposure to rich content.

To me, math test scores similarly relate to how we teach. Schools in the US continue to focus on one-step math problems and superficial coverage of concepts. On the international PISA exam, American students struggle mightily compared to students from other countries when it comes to multi-step math problems. This is partly due to our kids not having deep conceptual understanding of core math concepts, e.g., number operations, number flexibility, and algebraic reasoning.

What’s so gratifying to me is Trinity’s teaching of reading and math includes rich content exposure and ensures deeper conceptual understanding whether it’s subitizing in math or learning progressions in both subjects. And our standardized test results over the past few years tell the tale: our ERB scores both in reading and especially in math are well above the independent school norms.

Much like the slow food movement, I am a believer in the slow learning movement: for kids to truly understand, give them time to think, practice, go deeper, and demonstrate their learning in multiple ways.

Joe

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American students are struggling with reading. And the country's education system hasn't found a way to make it better.

In fact, fourth and eighth grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress essentially haven't budged in 10 years. That's causing some alarm, considering the number of reforms aimed at American schools over the past decade: stronger academic standards, more tests, stricter teacher evaluations and laws that discourage schools from promoting third-graders if they can't read proficiently, to name a few.

"Reading has just been more or less plateauing, stagnating," said Peggy Carr, a leader of the assessments division for the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP to a representative sample of students across the country every two years.

Results of the 2019 NAEP, also known as the Nation's Report Card, showed elementary and middle school students scored worse in reading than they did two years ago. Specifically, 35% of fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2019, slightly down from 37% in 2017 and barely up from 33% of such students considered proficient a decade ago, in 2009. About 34% of eighth-graders were proficient in reading this year, a drop from 36% in 2017 and only a tiny bit better than 32% in 2009. 

To be clear, the national exams set a high bar for proficiency – higher than most state achievement tests. But they're the only consistent measure of how students nationwide are doing in core subjects over time.

"Since the first reading assessment in 1992, there’s been no growth for the lowest-performing students in either fourth or eighth grade," Carr said. "Our students struggling the most with reading are where they were nearly 30 years ago." Most schools also don't spend enough time having children practice reading fluency and developing their vocabulary, said a literacy professor at Kent State University. Fluency helps kids understand words immediately and not use up so much mental capacity laboring on each one. "Fluency requires different instructional methods than phonics," he said. "Practice is key." 

Are national math scores any better? In the short term, not really. But over 27 years, they've improved more than reading scores. About 41% of fourth graders and 34% of eighth graders scored proficient in math in 2019. That's not significantly different from 2017. Carr said the math scores are also about the same as a decade ago. But since 1990, students at both grade levels have improved in math: Fourth graders this year scored 27 points higher on the 300-point exam compared with their peers in 1990. Eighth-grade students posted an average score that was 19 points higher than in 1990.

What else has happened to math and reading scores in the past decade? The gap between the most- and least-competent students got bigger.  "Compared to a decade ago, we see that lower-achieving students made score declines in all of the assessments, while higher-performing students made score gains," Carr said. This divergence in performance is one reason why average student achievement hasn't changed in a decade, Carr explained.