It seems that 95 per cent of school graduates in the US fail in simple comprehension with third graders spending 56pc of their time on literacy activities and 6pc each on science and social studies.
This disproportionate emphasis on literacy, suggest experts, backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension.
Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It is treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts.
Rather, says professor of psychology at the University of Virginia Daniel Willingham, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge.
“Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps Internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose,” he says.
“But our trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.”
Research suggests that of those who finished high school in the US, but did not continue their education, 13pc could not perform simple tasks like these.
When things got more complex, in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers, 95pc failed.
Students who score well on reading tests, says Professor Willingham, are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test.
Over the last 60 years, scientists including psychology, linguistics, paediatrics, education, neurobiology and engineering have been studying the reading process.
This science of reading has led to a number of breakthroughs that can dramatically reduce the number of children destined to become functionally illiterate or barely literate adults.
By routinely applying the lessons learned from the scientific findings to the classroom, most reading failure could be avoided. It is estimated that the current failure rate of 20 to 30pc could be reduced to the range of two to 10pc.
About 10 years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality, randomly selected a sample of 72 elementary education programmes that mirror the admissions selectivity of America’s 1,271 higher education institutions that house elementary education programmes.
Almost all of the 72 institutions in the study earned a “failing” grade, even though a passing grade was possible if a professor devoted less than 20pc of the lectures to the science of reading.
Institutions could receive a passing score if course materials merely referenced each of the five components of good reading instruction – without our knowing for certain if the science was taught correctly or adequately.
Schools that provided exposure to all five components received a score of 100pc, while schools that taught only one out of five components received a score of 20pc.
Schools that taught none of the five components received a zero.
“Even after we set the bar for passing so low, only 11 out of 72 institutions (15pc) were found to actually teach all the components of the science of reading,” say researchers.