Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report - S16

S16 |
EDUCATION WEEK MAY 13, 2015
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Building Literacy Skills > www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
I
Should 3rd Grade
Be Pivot Point for
Early Reading?
Research questions the
wisdom of retaining students
who struggle to read
IT'S BECOME A TRUISM IN EDUcation
policy that reading is the
gatekeeper to later academic success.
In hopes of ensuring that success,
a rising number of states bar
promotion for students who do not
read proficiently by 3rd grade.
In 2004, only Florida and Ohio
used 3rd grade reading as a gatekeeper
to promotion. Today, 16
states and the District of Columbia
require-and three others allow-
schools to retain 3rd graders based
on reading performance.
Yet even as retention gains traction
among state policymakers,
new research questions both the
effectiveness of holding back students
and the timing of reading
development itself.
"Not being able to decode is different
from phonological fluency,
which is different from not understanding
what words mean," said
Shane R. Jimerson, the chairman
of counseling, clinical, and school
psychology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. "Just
repeating a grade is not going to
magically solve all those problems,
and it adds the consequences psychologically
of being left behind."
'Reading to Learn'
The theorized cognitive shift from
"learning to read" in 3rd grade to
"reading to learn" in 4th grade may
not be as clear-cut as traditionally
thought, some experts say.
"I think that a lot of the basalreading
programs grabbed onto that
and structured their curricula so
there was a clear shift in 4th grade,
to move on from word work," said
Donna J. Coch, the principal investigator
for Dartmouth University's
Reading Brains Lab. "It became a
self-fulfilling prophesy."
In a 2014 study in Developmental
Science, Ms. Coch and her colleagues
tracked the brain activity
of students in grades 3-5, as well as
college students, as they saw a mix
of actual words like "bed," pseudowords
like "bem," and strings of
random letters or symbols.
In one test, they circled the real
Common Wisdom on Reading vs. Research
Test your knowledge about learning to read.
NATURAL DEVELOPMENT?
1) Children will instinctively learn to read if given enough time.
True or False?
READING TO LEARN
2) Kindergartners are developmentally capable of learning new
information from books.
True or False?
ON TRACK TO GRADUATION?
3) Students who do not read proficiently by 3rd grade are less
likely to graduate from high school on time.
True or False?
MULTIMEDIA: For answers to these and other questions, go to: www.edweek.org/go/reading-quiz
words on a written test, to measure
how well they consciously understood
the words, while in another
test, they saw one letter at a time,
which allowed researchers to measure
how quickly they processed
real words and meaningless series
of letters or symbols.
At a conscious level, the 4th and
5th graders were as accurate as
adults at identifying what was a
word and what was not a word,
but in brain scans, they continued
to process pseudowords like real
words through 5th grade. While on
a paper test, they looked like adult
readers, the scans showed they
processed words differently from
adults well past 4th grade.
While 4th and 5th grade teachers
often move to higher reading and
content skills, "our study shows the
lower-level skills are still developing
[in students] through elementary
school," Ms. Coch said.
The concept of children's continuously
developing reading brains
also plays out in the Common Core
State Standards, which call for students
to begin "reading to learn"-
that is, drawing information from
text-as early as kindergarten.
There is no clear break between
learning to read and reading to
learn.
"There isn't this magic age that,
if you don't catch a kid by that age,
you lose them forever," said Timothy
Shanahan, a distinguished
professor emeritus specializing in
literacy research at the University
of Illinois at Chicago and a lead
writer of the common-core language
arts standards. "It's harder
if a kid is six years behind to catch
him up than if he's two years behind,
but it's not because he's stupider
or loses the capacity to learn;
it's just a greater distance."
And the opposite also holds true:
"Just because you catch a 7-yearold
up and get him to his class
average, that's terrific, but that
doesn't guarantee his future, eiBy
Sarah D. Sparks

http://www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy http://www.edweek.org/go/reading-quiz

Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report

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