November 28, 2007

U.S. 4th Graders Trail Peers in Many Other Nations in Reading

An international study of reading literacy among fourth graders has found that students in the United States scored above the average for the 40 nations covered but trailed their counterparts in a dozen nations and several Canadian provinces.

The study, released this morning, also found that in all of the nations surveyed, girls outscored boys, and fewer children reported deriving enjoyment from reading than was the case when the international assessments were last given, five years earlier.

The study was conducted by researchers at Boston College on behalf of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Each of the 40 nations involved in the study evaluated about 4,000 students in 150 schools, with those in the Southern Hemisphere beginning their data collection in October 2005 and those in the Northern Hemisphere beginning in March 2006.

The highest scores were posted by Russia, followed by Hong Kong, the Canadian province of Alberta, and Singapore. The other nations posting substantially higher scores than the United States included Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, and Sweden.

The researchers examined various factors thought to influence reading achievement, extensively questioning parents and caregivers. They found that the strongest readers came from nations where reading was stressed in the home at an early age, and that those students who spent the most time in early-childhood education generally had the highest scores. —Peter Schmidt

Comments

1. Why not compare the United States with the “underdeveloped” English-speaking Caribbean?

   — Sylvan    Nov 28, 03:26 PM    #

2. Sylvan, you horrid man, isn’t it enough for you that we blush all over our “learner-centered” faces? Must you really make us hide under the spittoon in the darkest corner of the classroom?

   — Dag von Lubitz    Nov 28, 03:42 PM    #

3. I have a son in third grade and a son in first grade, and I am not surprised that kids are enjoying reading less. Before they started school, both boys LOVED books and reading. However, there are SO many reading activities that are required beyond regular homework and that do not allow much flexibility in choosing books, that schools are stifling the inherent fun in reading. I also love to read and love books, and I love to read with the boys. However, I HATE PARP (parents-as-reading-partners) month at school. If it becomes drudgery to me and to them, how can they stay enthusiastic about reading! My third grader thinks that the best part of the day in school is DEAR time — Drop Everything and Read. They stop for 20 minutes or so and read whatever they want in an unstructured and unsupervised fashion. I think he would enjoy reading at home more if it could be this free without all the logging in and reading only the specified books. I’ll be surprised if we as a family make it through high school without hating reading!

   — Concerned Mom    Nov 28, 03:45 PM    #

4. They measured the wrong thing. The study should’ve measured video game controller dexterity and shots-to-kill ratios. U.S. school-agers would surely be closer to the top in that study. Critics might argue that reading is passe, because fewer people assimilate information that way anymore. One one level the study parallels others, which have indicated that pretty much EVERYBODY in the U.S. is reading less these days.

   — Jerry    Nov 28, 04:24 PM    #

5. Jerry touches on my first impression as reading this. Is there an inverse relationship between reading and availability of TV/ Cable TV / video games on a per-country or regional basis? My 3rd grade boy (3rd of 3) loves to read, but he does come from a household that values reading, and explicitly devalues TV watching.

   — Ben M.    Nov 28, 04:45 PM    #

6. It is sad commentary that completly bankrupt countries like those in the former “eastern block” outscore the children of the wealthiest country in the world…..sad, so sad….to quote a line in a movie…“those marvelous Americans…so much power and so little idea of what to do with it”

   — Pat Moran    Nov 28, 04:53 PM    #

7. I enjoyed reading this article. I’m the founder of a new, innovative program called Boys Read. Our mission is to transform boys into lifelong readers. We are an organization of parents, educators, librarians, mentors, authors, and booksellers. One of our learning initiatives is teaching peace. For more information about Boys Read, please visit our website, boysread.org. We have a list of books that boys love to read.

   John-Seattle

   — John Martin    Nov 28, 10:24 PM    #

8. Reading is just not that important to most parents. If you ask parents how much time they spent reading to their kids versus how much time they spent working on their favorite athletic activity (soccer, little league, etc), it would be on the order of 5-to1 in the favor of the athletic activity. Slow jock inputs, slow jock outputs. It’s about priorities. Take a cold harsh look at yourself, America.

   Unfortunately educators are not absolved for blame—some elementary education programs teach that many young children cannot develop reading skills until the fourth or fifth grade, and that they should not be “discouraged” by trying too early. There are even private curricula that discourage early readers like the Waldorf schools. So why is everyone surprised???

   — Duh    Nov 29, 06:33 AM    #

9. The reporting here is incorrect: the U.S. did not “trail” 12 nations. There were only seven nations which scored higher than the U.S., plus a few Canadian provinces (which were, bizarrely, counted separately). The US was statistically tied with about 10 countries. See the original report, Figure 3.

   — Jeff McQuillan    Nov 30, 05:45 PM    #

10. As a young child, my dad would read me a different story every night before i went to sleep. I was so intrigued with what was happening that I always got disappointed when he said, “Thats enough for tonight.” I would beg him to read more. Today kids are becoming interested in different things such as sports and music, so they would rather do that than read a book. I think it would help the cause if schools would get kids interested in reading, and more parents would encourage their kids to read. There is a book out there for everybody. Books hold such amazing details you can’t get anywhere else, and once you pick up that certain book, you won’t be able to put it down.

    — Brittany Lin Falkner    Dec 4, 05:32 AM    #

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