The interest in the challenge of teaching children to read is long-standing. An estimated 93 million adults in the United States read at or below basic levels and face challenges finding living wage jobs as a result (Tennessee Department of Education, 2016). College-bound students and families across the country spend an estimated $1.3 billion on remedial coursework every year (Jimenez, Sargrad, Morales, & Thompson, 2016). Recent studies of college enrollment statistics have found that up to 60 percent of students in the United States are unprepared for college-level work in reading, math, or both. Research has shown that the inability to read proficiently in third grade is linked to difficulties learning in other subject areas, difficulties reading in later grades, and decreased likelihood of attending college (Tennessee Department of Education, 2016). There are many costs to the lack of reading proficiency. The results also emphasize the urgency for effective literacy interventions to differentiate reading instruction based on students’ needs, ultimately developing all students into the confident and capable readers they deserve to become (Murphy, 2010). students on the NAEP and PIRLS illustrates the need for a strong foundational literacy skills base to be developed in the earliest grades through effective reading programs containing systematic, explicit instruction in foundational literacy skills. The most recent NAEP and PIRLS data highlight the great need to improve the reading skills of students from diverse backgrounds, especially racially and ethnically diverse students and students with disabilities. fourth-grade students and students from 57 countries around the world, showed similarly disappointing results (Warner-Griffin et al., 2017).
Results from the 2016 administration of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment, which provides a comparison of reading achievement of U.S. Furthermore, for both age groups, the decline in NAEP reading scores from 2017 to 2019 was steeper for minority students than it was for white students (U.S.
For both age groups, the 2019 reading scores show a decrease of 2 percent from the 2017 scores of 37 percent and 36 percent, respectively. With new formats come new opportunities and challenges, as students encounter and interact with traditional print and digital content in all aspects of their daily lives.Īnd yet, results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading exams showed that only 35 percent of fourth-grade students and 34 percent of eighth-grade students scored proficient or higher in reading. Today, students learn to read across a variety of genres and formats, from environmental texts, to the classics, to graphic novels. Learning to read is one of the most important steps in a child’s educational development.