It’s a well-worn adage in education that students first learn to read, and then read to learn.
At some point, usually around 3rd grade, school systems assume that children have the basics down. They start requiring kids to read increasingly complex text across subject areas. But new research shows that many older students lack critical foundational skills, limiting how far they can progress in their reading abilities as the volume and variety of text grows steeper.
The study from researchers at ETS, a testing organization, and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, a group that creates research programs to support Black, Latino, and low-income students, confirms the idea of a “decoding threshold”—a baseline ability to sound out words that students need in order to make good progress on other literacy skills.
Kids who don’t meet this threshold see slower growth in their reading ability than their peers, the researchers found, which can lead to compounding gaps over time.
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