Many middle school students struggle to read well, study shows

Government schools in California are failures.  Worse, the more money you give them, the bigger the failures in the classrooms.

“More than 20% of students in fifth through seventh-grade trip over words they don’t recognize and can’t sound out. This obstacle keeps them from grasping the main idea of school reading assignments, according to a study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.

Plunging literacy rates in the wake of the pandemic are drawing more attention to the lack of adolescent reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed grim declines in eighth graders’ reading skills. However, experts have long known that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading skills such as phonics, grammar and vocabulary. 

While that is bad news, there is good news!!!  Government is granting diploma’s and promoting students that are function illiterates.  So don’t worry, McDonalds will still have a few jobs for the illiterate diploma owners.

Many middle school students struggle to read well, study shows

EdSource,  10/31/24  https://edsource.org/updates/many-middle-school-students-struggle-to-read-well-study-shows

New research reveals that many middle school students hit a “decoding threshold,” the 74 reported.

More than 20% of students in fifth through seventh-grade trip over words they don’t recognize and can’t sound out. This obstacle keeps them from grasping the main idea of school reading assignments, according to a study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.

Plunging literacy rates in the wake of the pandemic are drawing more attention to the lack of adolescent reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed grim declines in eighth graders’ reading skills. However, experts have long known that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading skills such as phonics, grammar and vocabulary. 

 “A lot of kids could very well have their basic K-2 foundational skills down pat, but they still need decoding support,” said Rebecca Sutherland, a co-author of the report and the associate director of research for Reading Reimagined, a project of the research and development fund, the 74 reported. “There’s an assumption … that kids can self-teach.”

The trouble is that working memory is easily exhausted so if you have to think too hard to sound a word out, you don’t have the mental bandwidth left to understand the whole sentence, let alone the paragraph.

“If decoding a sentence is consuming all of your cognitive capacity, then you’re not going to have anything left for comprehension,” Sutherland said

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