Working With Struggling Adolescent Readers: Another Year (and a half) of Reading Futures
Struggling adolescent readers
A quiet crisis haunts our schools. Worse post-COVID, but it’s always been there.
We set out to work on dyslexia. Across the country, we are finding adolescents – grades 4-12 – who are effectively unable to read. These are children who are sweet, kind, clever, and quick. Who are busy trying to find their place in the world.
They guess at words, struggle to sound out three-letter words, mix up vowel sounds. Some have built defenses – “I don’t like to read out loud.” But most still have hope: “I’d like to learn to read.”
Over the past 18 months, we found them everywhere. Together, we worked on letters and sounds, multisyllabic word reading strategies, and passage reading. Our students cheered one another on. They brought back big wins: “I read agriculture in social studies today!” They came to school a little more, and started getting better grades. As one principal put it, “They walk around differently now.”
Hear it from our students and school partners themselves:
Yes, it’s worse post-COVID – struggles in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade have grown dramatically. But the adolescent literacy crisis didn’t start in 2020.
For decades, U.S. reading policy (and funding) has been concentrated in the lead-up to third grade. Unfortunately, children who are predisposed to struggle with reading (including those with diagnosable dyslexia) are unlikely to make that “read to learn” hurdle. The full extent of their difficulties may not manifest until 4th or 5th grade, or even middle school.
Early elementary programs are equipped to support struggling readers. Upper grades often are not. Educators and school leaders can feel helpless. Working together with leading schools, we are proving that, together, we can get struggling adolescents back into reading.
Student voice
What does adolescent literacy success look like?
J came to us in the fall of 2022. He was in the fifth grade. He could only read four words from a grade level passage (DIBELS) in a minute – at the 1st percentile. He had missed 150 days of school over the previous two years.
That November, J joined one of our small groups of four students. After a summer off, we picked back up in the fall of 2023. By the middle of the year, he was reading 37 words per minute on grade-level text – still slow, but a rate that allows for comprehension.
Even better, his reading got to a level where he started learning vocabulary while reading – his teacher noticed him using words that he’d learned from independent reading.
In the second semester of sixth grade, he passed all of his classes. He has a reading future now.
Early results
The schools we worked with saw gains around the country, using the assessments they already had in place:
In Mount Vernon, NY, 5th and 6th grade students grew on iReady from an average grade level of 1.6 to 3.4. They attained 200% of expected annual growth.
In a Denver charter school, working with middle schoolers who started, on average, below the 2nd percentile, grew 0.25 standard deviations on the STAR composite in just a semester.
In Muncie Community Schools, this fall, their most struggling 4th and 5th graders made 87% of expected annual growth on iReady by December. This work builds on an Accelerate-supported multi-year RCT working with younger students (2nd and 3rd grade), which saw an effect size of 0.26 on DIBELS in the first year.
These results are early and directional. But they are important in four ways.
First, these gains are on independent, high-quality assessments that include passage reading, vocabulary, and background knowledge. Our intervention provides adolescents strategies to figure out unfamiliar words using a variety of word reading techniques. To see gains on assessments that are about reading passages, not just words, is awesome. Especially after just a semester or a year.
Second, these gains show what’s possible in adolescence. One reason adolescent literacy has been neglected by policymakers is that it has historically seemed intractable. The system has written off children who were identified late, or who presented with difficulties that did not respond to familiar interventions. We are working with students to re-write that narrative.
Third, these gains represent a major research-to-practice success. We are teaching programs that grew out of four decades of dyslexia intervention research, including multiple NICHD- and IES- funded studies. In a large-scale controlled study, with 500 students in middle school, they produced effect sizes of 0.56 on word reading and 0.36 on passage comprehension. We are replicating that work in partnership with the research team.
Fourth, we’re getting outcomes through a model that can grow. We’ve been walking Mike Goldstein and Bowen Paulle’s “narrow path” – watching the tapes, sweating the details, figuring out where our instruction matters most. We’ve emerged with teaching talent, programs, training and mentoring models, and culture that are well-defined.
Struggling adolescent readers are everywhere. They likely have a neurological predisposition (dyslexia), years of instructional gaps, or both. Whatever the origin, the symptoms are clear. Their principals and teachers know who they are. They themselves know who they are – and they want help. We’re here for it.
If you work with adolescents who struggle with reading, and would like to talk about our work, please drop us a line at info@readingfutures.com.
