This week's article summary is Older Students Need Help with Basic Reading, and it’s a follow-up to an earlier summary on how college freshmen today struggle with academics.
A number elementary schools, including Trinity, have implemented Science of Reading programs and formative assessments to identify areas where early remediation is needed.
While many of our current students will reap the benefits of enriched early literacy development, many current middle and high school students will continue to struggle due to poor literacy skills, from phonetics (sounds of language), orthnographics (spelling), semantics (word meaning and general knowledge), and syntax (arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence).
I am bullish about the literacy foundation we are building in our students, including the additions we’ve made this year to strengthen their content knowledge, a critical factor for reading comprehension.
Yet there’s a generation of older students who will never reach their academic potential due to poor basic literacy skills.
Joe
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Helping students learn to read is usually the job of early elementary educators.
But teachers of older children—who report that nearly half of their students have difficulty reading—say they need more training in this area, too.
The survey from the RAND Corporation included 1,500 teachers in grades 3-8. Teachers in these grades reported that 44 percent of their students always or nearly always faced challenges reading the content in their classes. Ninety-seven percent of teachers said they modified their instruction to support struggling readers at least once a week.
The results come on the heels of previous RAND survey that found many secondary teachers still work with students on foundational reading skills like sounding out words and spelling.
As states have pushed school districts to adopt evidence-based practices in early elementary reading instruction, a movement known as the “science of reading,” these two reports suggest they might also have to fill in knowledge gaps for teachers of older students.
“K-3 is when we expect that most students learn these skills,” said Anna Shapiro, policy researcher at RAND. “But we’re at a point where we have older kids in some grades that are still developing these skills.”
Reading problems for older students can have disastrous ripple effects across the school day. In these older grades, it’s not only English/language arts classes that require strong reading skills, but social studies, science, and math. In the RAND survey, teachers of subjects other than ELA said their students spent about half of class time reading and writing.
But teachers of older students usually don’t receive training on addressing the kinds of foundational reading difficulties that can hamper students’ access to more complex text. And there often isn’t time to remediate basic skills when teachers are working with their students toward higher-level concepts.
The reasons why older students struggle with reading can also be more complex and layered than they are for younger children.
“There’s no ceiling to learning to read,” Shapiro said. “As soon as a child has mastered the foundational skills that they need to look at a word and decode it, the higher-order reading skills that students continue to develop just get more and more complex as students get older. For a student who has gotten to 4th, 5th, 6th grade and is still struggling with those foundational skills, it is making it harder for them to access that higher-order literacy skill development that we hope students are achieving.”
“We feel like the national literacy discussion has still almost exclusively focused on young readers,” said Christina Cover, a special education teacher and literacy coordinator. “We know that shift to reading to learn—that doesn’t happen for kids who are still struggling.”
To help students make that shift, teachers say they need more resources. More one-on-one help for students was particularly popular: 48 percent of middle school teachers said they had a moderate or major need for reading specialists, while 45 percent identified a moderate or major need for tutors.
“It might be that teachers are thinking, ‘I need somebody else’s help, I don’t have the training or the expertise that I need to do this,’” Shapiro said.
Teachers also wanted more training: Two in 5 teachers surveyed held at least one misconception about how children learn to read, such as agreeing with the statement that “most students will learn to read on their own if given the proper books and time to read them.”
Shapiro stressed that training and resources for teachers in older grades should be age-appropriate for their students. “When we’re thinking about policy changes, … we’re not suggesting that you should throw all the 3-8 teachers in the reading class that the K-2 teachers take in their teacher preparation,” she said.
For example, research shows that intervention targeting multiple skills at once--such as fluency and comprehension—can have higher positive effects for older students than single-skill practice.
Students who have gone from grade to grade without seeing much progress tend to develop avoidance strategies for reading.
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