It’s a well-worn adage in education that students first learn to read, and then read to learn.
At some point, usually around 3rd grade, school systems assume that children have the basics down. They start requiring kids to read increasingly complex text across subject areas.
But new research shows that many older students lack critical foundational skills, limiting how far they can progress in their reading abilities as the volume and variety of text grows steeper.
The study from researchers at ETS, a testing organization, and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, a group that creates research programs to support Black, Latino, and low-income students, confirms the idea of a “decoding threshold”—a baseline ability to sound out words that students need in order to make good progress on other literacy skills.
Kids who don’t meet this threshold see slower growth in their reading ability than their peers, the researchers found, which can lead to compounding gaps over time.
The research is a replication study of 2019 and 2020 papers on this phenomenon, but with a larger group of students. Among the students in the sample, most of whom were in a large, urban district on the East Coast, more than 20 percent of 5th, 6th, and 7th graders fell below the decoding threshold.
The results mean that for some portion of older students, the reading interventions schools use for this age group—most of which focus on reading comprehension—likely won’t solve the root cause of students’ struggles.
Schools have likely long had students with inadequate decoding skills without knowing, said Rebecca Sutherland, an author on the study, and the associate director of research at AERDF’s Reading Reimagined, an initiative that aims to advance foundational reading skills in grades 3-8.
“We don’t test students’ foundational literacy skills after 3rd grade as a rule, unless they’ve been flagged as needing to have special attention,” she said.
Having more data on the scope of the problem is helpful, said Kate Crist, a literacy consultant and member of the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy, a educator-led group to support older struggling readers.
But understanding this need should lead to action, she said. “What are we going to do to intervene for those students, and provide a valuable intervention that’s actually worth their time and the school district’s tens of millions of dollars?”
Students below the decoding threshold see slower reading growth
Reading well requires a varied set of skills. Readers need to know the vocabulary in a text and bring their background knowledge to bear on texts to understand new topics. Then there are metacognitive processes that good readers employ, like monitoring their comprehension.
But even if students have all of these skills, they can’t read well if they can’t decode the words on the page.
Ensuring that children learn these phonics skills in early elementary classrooms has been a main focus of the growing “science of reading” movement. More than two dozen states have passed legislation over the last five years requiring that schools teach evidence-based methods for sounding out words, and that teachers be trained in how to deliver this instruction.
But even as practice begins to shift, there are many older students who won’t benefit from policy changes mostly targeted at grades K-5.
“Let’s just be honest. We are still sending cohorts of kids to middle and high school who have been denied access to literacy in their K-5 environment,” said Crist.
The ETS and AERDF study examined the reading growth of about 17,000 students in grades 5-9 between 2011 and 2014 on an ETS assessment, Capti ReadBasix. Students who were below the decoding threshold had lower scores across reading subskills—like vocabulary and comprehension—than their peers. They also made much slower progress in those subskills over time.
For example, 5th graders who were above the decoding threshold grew 5.5 points in vocabulary knowledge each year on average. Students who were below the threshold only grew 2.3 points each year.
The researchers also looked at a key measure of decoding ability—how students tackled reading nonsense words. These are “words” that have phonetically regular spelling patterns but no meaning in English. The study analyzed word-reading data from more than 14,000 students in grades 3-12, between 2020 and 2023.
Students who were above the decoding threshold read real words quickly, and nonwords more slowly. It’s likely that these students were taking more time with the nonwords because they were sounding them out—using their decoding skills, said Sutherland.
But students below the decoding threshold showed a slightly different pattern. There was less of a gap between how long it took them to read real words and nonwords.
“That suggests that they are less reliant on sound-based strategies,” Sutherland said.
Struggling students need ‘strategic, systematic’ solutions
To support these students, schools first need to figure out who they are, experts say.
“There’s not a lot of good testing instruments for kids that are normed and referenced for older students,” said Crist.
In part, this is because older students have more “heterogeneous” learning profiles, said Sutherland. Some students below the threshold might have trouble decoding even the most basic words. Others might have mastered the basics, but struggle with more complex or multisyllabic words.
Different needs require different instructional approaches, Crist said.
A 10th grader who reads at a 6th grade level, for example, might be able to get the support they require with an attentive, intentional teacher. English/language arts lessons would include lots of fluency practice, and explicit instruction in morphology, the study of word parts. Teachers would work to build up students’ background knowledge so that they can more easily understand a variety of texts.
“For those kids, you see a pretty good payoff in a classroom,” Crist said.
But when students can’t decode, and they’re more than a couple of grade levels behind, fluency practice and morphology instruction can only have a limited effect.
“Because they can’t read independently, they can’t do that work on their own,” said Crist. “Those kids really need strategic, systematic stuff.”
A surprising percentage of teachers of older students, do, in fact, spend time working with them on foundational reading skills—a quarter of middle school teachers say they engage their classes in phonics activities, according to a RAND survey from this year.
But these teachers also say they need more support and resources to do this well: Most middle and high school teachers don’t get training on supporting foundational literacy.
“Whatever they know about supporting students’ foundational reading skills, they’ve just kind of learned on the job,” Sutherland said.
Schools can’t rely on teachers to pick up the slack alone, Crist said. Middle and high schools aren’t designed to teach basic reading skills, and the infrastructure that fosters this work in elementary schools—reading interventionists on staff, dedicated periods for reading support services—is much less common in upper grades.
“How do we begin to create an ecosystem in 6-12 for reading instruction like we have in K-2?” Crist asked.
It’s a question that has to be answered in collaboration with the teachers and administrators who exist in middle and high school systems, she said. “The field deserves, and is owed, practical advice.”
