KEY FINDINGS
> > Students, even those who find reading challenging, thrive in classrooms that are filled with books at different levels, where the teacher celebrates books—creating colorful book displays and giving book talks that promote favorite titles—and students are given the choice of what they read, as well as time and support to read it (Miller and Sharp, 2018; Scharer et al. 2018; Allington, 2012). > > Walczyk and Griffin-Ross (2007) found that striving readers benefit from some say in what they read and how they read it. In other words, they benefit when they are allowed to choose books they want to read, slow down their reading, and implement compensatory strategies, such as reading out loud, back tracking and rereading, pausing, skipping words they don’t know, using onset rime patterns (Zinke, 2017), analogizing to a known word, or using context to predict what word might come next (Hiebert, 2018). > > Guthrie (2004), commenting on the results of two large national and international sets of data examining the relationship between reading engagement and achievement, writes, “Based on this massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.” > > The Kids Count report Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters makes clear what’s at stake when primary students fail to thrive as confident readers: “Reading proficiently by the end of third grade (as measured by NAEP at the beginning of fourth grade) can be a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development” (2010). > > Researchers Catherine Snow et al. maintain that “academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing a student’s reading skill at the end of third grade. A child who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by that time is unlikely to graduate from high school” (1998). > > Students who are assigned to the “slow” reading group often feel stupid. “Our first experience with reading influences our perceptions of our intelligence, even as adults …If you ask an adult, ‘Do you consider yourself above average, about average, or below average?’ most of them have a clear picture of where they fall on the intelligence spectrum—based on the years when they were learning to read” (Johnson, 2011).
34
CHAPTER 1: READERS
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs