970x125
U.S. elementary school students have been displaying declining reading achievement, particularly among those who are struggling. For example, the average scores among 4th-grade students in the lowest 10th percentile declined by 10 points from 2020 to 2022. This was five times the decline of students in the highest 90th percentile. The sociodemographic groups who are especially likely to be struggling readers during elementary school include Black, Hispanic, or American Indian students, those from low-income families, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners.
To date, however, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners have lacked information about which U.S. students are likely to be struggling readers as they begin kindergarten and then attend 1st–5th grade. Also unclear are the modifiable factors that help to explain why students from some sociodemographic groups are especially likely to be struggling readers. Available work is largely based on cross-sectional data collected only during 4th grade. The few longitudinal studies available report mixed findings about whether differences in family socioeconomic status (SES), home literacy environments, and executive functioning help to explain the risks for early reading difficulties. Researchers have mostly examined specific deficits in student-level cognitive or academic skills, usually assessed at only one point in time. This is why researchers are repeatedly calling for studies assessing a wider range of risk and protective factors for early reading difficulties, particularly those based on diverse, nationally representative samples followed across multiple elementary grades.
Our new study responds to these calls by examining the early onset, over-time stability, and explanatory factors for reading difficulties across elementary school. We did this through analyses of a nationally representative sample of over 16,000 students, followed from kindergarten to the end of 5th grade. We designed the study to identify the modifiable factors across home and school contexts that most strongly predict the likelihood of experiencing severe reading difficulties across multiple elementary grades. These explanatory factors included sociodemographic factors like the family’s SES and language use, parenting practices and the home literacy environment, the school’s racial, ethnic, and economic composition, and the children’s kindergarten levels of reading, mathematics, and science achievement, classroom behaviors, and executive functioning.
Who Struggles with Reading During Elementary School?
The descriptive analyses indicated that some sociodemographic groups of students are especially likely to struggle in reading across elementary school. For example, about 15% of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students displayed reading difficulties during kindergarten. The contrasting percentages for White and Asian students were 6% and 8%. By 5th grade, the percentage of Black students experiencing reading difficulties had increased to 20%. About 15-20% of Black or Hispanic students displayed both severe and persistent reading difficulties across two or more elementary grades. The contrasting percentages for White and Asian students were 7% and 4%. Students from lower SES families, those with disabilities, and multilingual learners were also likely to repeatedly struggle in reading across elementary school. These student groups are likely to have disproportionately greater needs for early reading interventions.
However, and importantly, the study’s other explanatory factors helped explain the initially observed risks for the sociodemographic groups. For example, the odds that Black and Hispanic students displayed reading difficulties in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade were 2-3 times greater than White students in analyses not accounting for family SES, school racial and ethnic composition, or other factors. Accounting for these additional factors, particularly the family’s SES and the student’s kindergarten levels of academic achievement and executive functioning, fully explained the risks initially attributable to race, ethnicity, or language use. The study’s additional factors also fully explained whether Black or Hispanic students or those who are multilingual learners displayed severe and persistent reading difficulties across multiple elementary grades.
What Can We Do?
Collectively, the results suggest that policies and practices that address economic disadvantage and academic and executive functioning difficulties by kindergarten may help prevent early reading difficulties across elementary school, including those disproportionately experienced by students of color and multilingual learners. Examples of policies or practices that might be introduced to lower the risks for reading difficulties during elementary school include financial support to economically disadvantaged families, universal screening systems that assess for a wider range of risk factors other than specific reading skills, using multicomponent interventions that target both academic skills and executive functioning, and instructing students in ways that reliably increase their decoding and reading fluency skills.
Our findings are also consistent with prior work suggesting that students from historically marginalized communities may be more likely to experience reading difficulties across elementary school due to unrecognized disabilities and barriers in access to supports and services in schools. Our regression-based estimates suggest that, if U.S. students were experiencing equal levels of economic and educational opportunities by kindergarten, then Black, Hispanic, American Indian students and those who are multilingual learners would be as or less likely as White or English-speaking students to experience reading difficulties across elementary school.
