Teaching students to read is usually the job of elementary school teachers, but teachers of older children — who report that nearly half of their students struggle with reading — say they need more training in that area, too, a new survey finds.
The RAND Corporation’s nationally representative survey included 1,483 teachers in grades 3 through 8. On average, teachers in these grades reported that 44 percent of their students always or almost always had trouble reading the material. Ninety-seven percent of teachers reported that they had adapted their instruction at least once or twice a week to support struggling readers.
The results follow an earlier RAND survey which found that many secondary school teachers are still working with their students on basic reading skills such as word pronunciation and spelling.
As states urged school districts to These two reports address evidence-based practices in reading instruction in early elementary schools, a movement known as the “science of reading,” and suggest that they may also need to address knowledge gaps among teachers of older students.
“We expect most students to learn these skills in the preschool and elementary grades,” said Anna Shapiro, a policy researcher at RAND and lead author of the report. “But we’re at a point where we have older children in some grades who are still developing these skills.”
Why reading problems can be more difficult in older children
Reading problems in older students can have a devastating impact on the entire school day. In these higher grades, not only English/language arts classes, but also social studies, science, and even math depend on strong reading skills. In the RAND survey, teachers of subjects other than English reported that their students spend about half of their class time reading and writing.
But teachers of older students typically don’t receive training in dealing with basic reading difficulties that can prevent students from accessing more complex texts. And there’s often no time to teach basic skills when teachers are working with their students on more challenging goals, like writing argumentative essays or analyzing poetry.
The reasons for reading difficulties in older students can also be more complex and multifaceted than in younger children.
“There is no ceiling to learning to read,” Shapiro said. “Once a child has mastered the basic skills needed to look at and decode a word, the advanced reading skills students develop become increasingly complex as they get older and also vary by subject.”
“For a student who has reached fourth, fifth or sixth grade and is still struggling with these basic skills, it will make it more difficult to achieve the higher-level literacy development that we hope students achieve,” she said.
There is evidence that older students show some of these basic gaps. Nearly half of upper elementary school teachers and nearly one in five middle school teachers reported that they teach reading skills such as phonics and spelling three or more times a week.
Most states have passed laws requiring schools to use evidence-based methods to support younger readers with reading difficulties. But only a few have extended this mandate to middle school.
“We feel like the national conversation about reading literacy is still almost exclusively focused on young readers,” says Christina Cover, a special education teacher and reading coordinator in the Bronx, New York City. Cover is also project director of the Project for Adolescent Literacy, a new educator-led group to support middle and high school students with reading difficulties.
“We know that the shift to reading as a learning method does not occur in children who are still struggling,” she said.
Older students need different support than beginning readers
To make this transition easier for students, teachers say they need more resources.
Increased individual support for students was particularly popular: 48 percent of middle school teachers stated that they had a medium to high need for reading specialists, and 45 percent identified a medium to high need for tutors.
“Maybe teachers think, ‘I need someone else’s help, I don’t have the training or the expertise to do this,'” Shapiro said.
The teachers also called for more training:
Two out of five teachers surveyed had at least one misconception about how children learn to read. For example, they agreed with the statement that “most students learn to read on their own if they have the right books and time to read.”
Shapiro emphasized that training and resources for higher-level teachers should be appropriate for the age of their students.
“When we think about policy change, … we are not suggesting that all teachers in grades 3 through 8 should be put into the reading classes that teachers in grades K-2 take as part of their teacher training,” she said.
For example, studies show that interventions that target multiple skills simultaneously– such as fluency and comprehension – can have greater positive effects for older students than practicing individual skills.
Cover’s group, the Project for Adolescent Literacy, conducted a survey Identify methods middle and high school teachers use to help struggling readers and plans to build a resource bank that these teachers can use.
She also hopes that teachers will address social-emotional issues which are often associated with reading difficulties in teenagers.
Students who went from grade to grade without making much progress tended to develop “avoidance strategies” for reading, she said.
“They’ve seen it all before and feel like it’s not going to do them any good,” Cover said. “I think students are right to be a little skeptical when they’re in high school and still struggling with some of these basic skills.”