Many Students Struggle to Read Beyond Third Grade

The science of reading movement has focused on improving phonics instruction for children in the early grades, but it has largely overlooked students at higher grade levels.

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Years ago, I was startled when a former teacher told me about her experience administering reading tests to incoming 9^th graders at a school serving a low-income community. The average reading level, she said, was 3^rd grade.

Her experience occurred at least 10 years ago, but indications are that the situation hasn’t improved much. Last month, the New York Times reported that at the city’s lowest-income high schools, it’s not uncommon for a quarter of incoming freshman to test at or below the 3^rd grade level.

The Times story is just part of a welcome flurry of coverage of this long-neglected issue. The RAND Corporation, for example, issued a report last month documenting reading problems in the upper elementary and middle grades. It found that teachers of 3^rd to 8^th graders estimate that 44% of their students “always or nearly always experience difficulty reading the written content within their instructional materials.” At the same time, those teachers report that their students spend more than half of class time reading and writing, or trying to—not just in English or ELA class but across subjects. (The research for the report was sponsored by the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, or AERDF, and conducted by RAND.)

This is a situation that is frustrating and demoralizing not only for students but for their teachers as well. Almost 75 percent of the teachers surveyed by RAND said they need access to more resources to identify and support students with reading difficulties.

If you’re an educator who works with struggling readers in middle and high school, consider participating in a survey sponsored by an educator-led group called the Project for Adolescent Literacy. The group is gathering information about current literacy practices to catalog what works and begin to share stories and examples demonstrating the need to address the problem of adolescents who face literacy challenges.

Click here for a link to the survey, which is open through Monday, September 16^th at 5:00 p.m. EDT.

Why Older Students May Have Trouble Reading

One problem is that teachers above third grade rarely get training in how to teach reading, either in their teacher-prep programs or through on-the-job professional development. The assumption is that students have already learned how to decipher or “decode” words in prior years.

Often, however, that’s not the case. In many elementary schools, phonics instruction hasn’t aligned with scientific evidence for decades. Many states are now providing training for teachers aimed at addressing that problem, but it’s usually directed only at early elementary teachers.

Even if students have gotten adequate instruction in decoding simple words in the early grades, they may still be stymied by the multi-syllabic words they encounter at higher grade levels. That—along with factors like a lack of familiarity with the vocabulary and concepts in the texts they’re expected to read—can interfere with their reading comprehension.

Here’s why: All of us have limitations on the amount of new information we can understand at any one time. It’s been found that on average, we can only hold about five items of new information in short-term or working memory for about 20 seconds before we start to become overwhelmed and lose our ability to comprehend, analyze, or retain the information. The best way around those limitations is to have information stored in long-term memory, which is potentially infinite, and to be able to retrieve that information when we need it. That opens up more capacity in working memory to take in new information.

Working memory can become overloaded if we’re trying to understand an article or lecture that assumes familiarity with a lot of information we don’t have. When it comes to reading in particular, another source of “cognitive load” can be difficulties with decoding the words or figuring out where to put the emphasis in a sentence. If those things aren’t automatic, we have to devote so much cognitive capacity to them that it interferes with our ability to understand what we’re reading. The complex sentence structure of written language can also be an obstacle to comprehension.

Struggling readers at higher grade levels are likely suffering from multiple sources of cognitive overload. They often haven’t had the opportunity to acquire much of the vocabulary and knowledge assumed by the texts they’re expected to read in school, primarily because of our systemic failure to start building that kind of knowledge in the elementary grades. On top of that, they’re devoting a lot of mental effort to just decoding the words and understanding the sentence structure. The result is that they spend years of their schooling feeling like academic failures, through no fault of their own, and they often simply give up.

Teachers at Higher Grade Levels Need a Different Kind of Training

From the RAND survey, it’s clear that teachers at higher grade levels in all subject areas recognize that many of their students are struggling with reading, but they may not know exactly why or what to do about it. The survey found that 40 percent have misconceptions about how students develop word-reading skills, and nearly half say their main source of knowledge on reading instruction comes from their own experience in the classroom—which is, unfortunately, not always a reliable guide.

Despite their general lack of training, nearly half of the elementary teachers and one fifth of the middle school teachers surveyed report that they teach word-reading skills like phonics three or more times a week—or try to. About 70 percent say they need training to support their students in developing fluency, reading comprehension, and background knowledge.

These teachers do need training, but not necessarily the same training that their counterparts at lower grade levels do. While the principles relating to how students acquire the ability to read are the same at any grade level, the methods and materials may not be.

Too often, struggling readers at higher grade levels are given simple materials geared to much younger students, reinforcing their feelings of failure. They may also be “pulled” from regular classes for reading intervention, causing them to miss out on grade-level content and instruction and putting them even farther behind their peers.

Promising Approaches for Older Students

I’ve already written about one promising approach called Readable English, which uses technology to make it easier for students to learn to decode multi-syllabic words. A summary of other evidence-backed approaches can be found in a post that recently appeared on the blog of the Shanker Institute, written by David and Meredith Liben and Susan Pimentel.

The authors of the post emphasize using strategies that connect with the grade-level materials students are reading as part of the regular curriculum—which should include rich content rather than focusing on decontextualized comprehension skills like “making inferences.”

For example, they suggest teaching phonics using words from those materials and focusing on how prefixes and suffixes change a word’s meaning. (I’m reminded of the 10^th-grader I once tutored who was stumped by the word admirable, even though he knew the word admire.)

One common problem at higher grade levels is an inability to read text at an appropriate pace with appropriate expression—in other reads, an inability to read fluently. The Shanker Institute post suggests a number of strategies to increase fluency, including whole-class choral reading—using texts from the curriculum—and “Readers’ Theater,” which has students “perform” a script as they read it aloud.

All of these are good suggestions, but I would add that explicitly teaching students to write about what they’re learning can also boost learning at any grade level—including higher ones—as studies have shown. Not only does writing about content help ensure understanding and retention of information, teaching students how to use the complex sentence structure of written language in their own writing helps familiarize them with that kind of syntax, boosting reading comprehension. If you’ve learned how to use, say, a subordinating conjunction, you’re in a much better position to understand it when you encounter it in text.

It's important for teachers to have information about how to help struggling readers, but it may be challenging for them to integrate these various recommendations into their regular classroom instruction. Ideally, curricula at all grade levels—and across all subjects—will provide that integration, incorporating literacy routines at appropriate points in a lesson and lightening the burden on individual teachers. Too often, however, they don’t.

We need to recognize that literacy instruction can’t end at third grade—and that literacy includes not only reading but writing. Even more fundamentally, we need to understand the inextricable links between literacy and content-area learning and eliminate the artificial walls that have been erected between them, in terms of both research and practice.