More Reading Equates to Greater Vocabulary Gains 30 Minutes
This is the second entry in the Education Leader's Guide to Reading Growth, a seven-part series almost the relationship between reading exercise, reading growth, and overall student achievement.
In our last post, we examined how reading practice characteristics differ between persistently struggling students and students who start out struggling but end up succeeding—and how stiff reading skills are linked to loftier school graduation rates and college enrollment rates.
Notwithstanding, it's not just struggling readers who could do good from more reading exercise. A study of the reading practices of more than 9.9 million students over the 2015–2016 school year found that more than one-half of the students read less than 15 minutes per day on average.i
Fewer than one in v students averaged a half-hour or more of reading per twenty-four hour period, and fewer than one in three read between 15 and 29 minutes on a daily ground.
The problem is that 15 minutes seems to exist the "magic number" at which students get-go seeing substantial positive gains in reading achievement, yet less than one-half of our students are reading for that amount of time.
15 minutes seems to be the "magic number" at which students start seeing substantial positive gains in reading achievement; students who read just over a half-hour to an hour per 24-hour interval run across the greatest gains of all.
An assay comparing the engaged reading fourth dimension and reading scores of more than 2.2 meg students plant that students who read less than five minutes per day saw the lowest levels of growth, well below the national average.2 Fifty-fifty students who read 5–fourteen minutes per day saw sluggish gains that were beneath the national boilerplate.
Only students who read 15 minutes or more a day saw accelerated reading gains—that is, gains higher than the national boilerplate—and students who read just over a one-half-60 minutes to an 60 minutes per day saw the greatest gains of all.
Although many other factors—such equally quality of instruction, equitable access to reading materials, and family background—as well play a role in achievement, the consistent connection between fourth dimension spent reading per 24-hour interval and reading growth cannot be ignored.
Moreover, if reading practise is linked to reading growth and achievement, and so it follows that low levels of reading practice should correlate to low levels of reading performance and high levels of reading practice should connect to high levels of reading performance. This pattern is precisely what we see in pupil test data.
Strong connections between reading practice and achievement
An analysis of more than 174,000 students' Plan for International Educatee Assessment (PISA) scores revealed that connectedness between reading engagement and reading performance was "moderately strong and meaningful" in all 32 countries examined, including the United States.3 On average, students who spent more than time reading, read more than diverse texts, and saw reading as a valuable activity scored higher on the PISA'due south combined reading literacy calibration.
The report also found a educatee's level of reading engagement was more highly correlated with their reading achievement than their socioeconomic condition, gender, family structure, or time spent on homework. In fact, students with the everyman socioeconomic background but loftier reading engagement scored improve than students with the highest socioeconomic background only low reading engagement.
Overall, students with high reading engagement scored significantly above the international average on the combined reading literacy calibration, regardless of their family unit background. The opposite was besides truthful, with students with low reading appointment scoring significantly beneath the international boilerplate, no affair their socioeconomic status.
The authors suggested that reading practise can play an "important role" in closing accomplishment gaps between dissimilar socioeconomic groups. Frequent high-quality reading practice may help children compensate for—and even overcome—the challenges of being socially or economically disadvantaged, while a lack of reading practise may erase or potentially reverse the advantages of a more privileged background. In short, reading practice matters for kids from all walks of life.
For students within the United states, reading practise may not only be more than of import than socioeconomic status—information technology may also exist more than important than many schoolhouse factors.
Looking at only American students' PISA scores, we encounter that reading engagement had a higher correlation with reading literacy achievement than time spent on homework, relationships with teachers, a sense of belonging, classroom environment, or even force per unit area to achieve (which had a negative correlation). In addition, a regression analysis showed achievement went upward beyond all measures of reading literacy operation when reading engagement increased.
Although the PISA only assesses 15-year-olds, similar patterns can exist seen in both younger and older American students. In 2013, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) compared students' National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores with their reading habits.4 For all historic period groups, they found a articulate correlation between the frequency with which students read for fun and their average NAEP scores: The more than frequently students read, the higher their scores were.
What is especially interesting nigh the NAEP results is that the correlation betwixt reading frequency and reading scores was true for all age groups and the score gaps increased across the years. Amongst 9-year-olds, there was but an 18-point difference between children who reported reading "never or hardly ever" and those who read "almost every day." By age 13, the gap widened to 27 points. At age 17, it farther increased to 30 points.
This seems to run contrary to the commonly held wisdom that reading practice is nigh important when children are learning how to read but less essential in one case primal reading skills have been acquired. Indeed, we might fifty-fifty hypothesize the opposite—that reading practice may grow more important equally students movement from grade to grade and run into more than challenging reading tasks. Until more research either confirms or disproves this possible explanation, information technology is nothing more than than a judge, just an interesting one to consider nonetheless.
However, what is articulate is that reading practice is decreasing amid all age groups, with the most dramatic decreases among the very students who may need information technology the most.
Troubling declines in reading practice
Over the last three decades, reading rates take dramatically declined in the United States. In 1984, NAEP results showed the vast majority of ix-twelvemonth-olds read for fun once or more than per week, with more than half reporting reading almost every day. Only one in five reported reading 2 or fewer times per month. By 2012, 25% of all 9-year-olds were reading for pleasance fewer than 25 days per year.5
For older students, the drop is even more precipitous. In 1984, 35% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day, and some other 35% read i or ii times per week—in total, more than two-thirds of 13-year-olds reported reading at to the lowest degree once a week. In 2012, virtually half read less than in one case a week.
Amid 17-year-olds, the percentage reading almost every solar day dropped from 31% in 1984 to only nineteen% in 2012, while the percentage who read for fun less than in one case a week rose from 36% to 61%. The number of 17-year-olds reporting reading "never or inappreciably ever" actually tripled.
And the decline in reading is non due to students spending more time on homework in 2012 than in 1984. During the same fourth dimension period, the percentage of students who reported spending more than an hour on homework actually declined.
In 1984, nineteen% of 9-yr-olds, 38% of thirteen-year-olds, and 40% of 17-year-olds reported spending an hour or more on homework the 24-hour interval prior to the NAEP. In 2012, those numbers had dropped to 17% for nine-year-olds, 30% for 13-year-olds, and 36% for 17-yr-olds.
Why are nosotros seeing the greatest gaps and the greatest declines in the oldest students? Although many different factors are likely at play, one of them might be that the effects of reading do are cumulative over a student'due south schooling, especially when it comes to vocabulary.
The long-term effects of reading do
What's the divergence between kids who read more 30 minutes per day and those who read less than 15 minutes per day?
Twelve million.
Between kindergarten and 12th grade, students with an boilerplate daily reading time of 30+ minutes are projected to encounter thirteen.7 million words. At graduation, their peers who averaged less than 15 minutes of reading per day are likely to be exposed to only one.5 million words. The departure is more than than 12 million words. Children in between, who read fifteen–29 minutes per day, volition encounter an average of 5.7 one thousand thousand words—less than half of the high-reading group just nearly 4 times that of the low-reading group.1
Some researchers judge students learn one new word of vocabulary for every m words read.6 Using this ratio, a student who reads only one.5 meg words would larn only ane,500 new vocabulary words from reading, while a educatee who reads 13.7 million words would learn xiii,700 new vocabulary terms—more than ix times the corporeality of vocabulary growth.
This is specially important when nosotros consider that students tin learn far more words from reading than from direct instruction: Even an aggressive schedule of twenty new words taught each calendar week volition result in only 520 new words by the terminate of the typical 36-calendar week school year. This does not mean that reading practice is "better" than direct education for edifice vocabulary—direction pedagogy is key, but teachers tin can only do so much of it. Instead, we ask educators to imagine the potential for vocabulary growth if direct instruction, structural analysis strategies, and reading practice are all used to reinforce one another.
Vocabulary plays a disquisitional role in reading accomplishment. Inquiry has shown that more than than half the variance in students' reading comprehension scores tin be explained by the depth and breadth of their vocabulary knowledge—and these 2 vocabulary factors can even be used to predict a student'south reading operation.7
We can run into the relationship between vocabulary and reading accomplishment clearly in NAEP scores, where the students who had the highest average vocabulary scores were the students performing in the top quarter (above the 75th percentile) of reading comprehension. Similarly, students with the everyman vocabulary scores were those who were in the bottom quarter (at or below the 25th percentile) in reading comprehension.eight This ways those boosted 12 million words could potentially have a huge touch on student success.
So what are we to do, when reading practice is so conspicuously connected to both vocabulary exposure and reading accomplishment, but not plenty students are getting enough reading practice to drive substantial growth?
The answer seems clear. Nosotros need to brand increasing reading do a superlative priority for all students in all schools. Making reading practice a system-broad objective may be one of the most important things we tin can practice for our students' long-term outcomes, peculiarly when we combine it with loftier-quality instruction and constructive reading curricula. It is fourth dimension to put as much focus on reading practice equally we do on school culture, student-educator relationships, and socioeconomic factors.
Even so, non all reading exercise is built the same. Quantity matters, but and so does quality. In the next post in this serial, we explore how you lot can ensure your students are getting the most out of every infinitesimal of reading do.
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References
ane Renaissance Learning. (2016). What kids are reading: And how they grow. Wisconsin Rapids, WI: Writer.
2 Renaissance Learning. (2015). The research foundation for Accelerated Reader 360. Wisconsin Rapids, WI: Author.
3 Kirsch, I., de Jong, J., Lafontaine, D., McQueen, J., Mendelovits, J., & Monseur, C. (2002). Reading for change: Functioning and engagement across countries: Results from PISA 2000. Paris, France: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
4 National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). The nation's report bill of fare: Trends in academic progress 2012 (NCES 2013 456). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Institute of Instruction Sciences.
5 National Center for Didactics Statistics. (2013). Table 221.30: Average National Cess of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scale score and percent distribution of students, by age, amount of reading for school and for fun, and time spent on homework and watching Television/video: Selected years, 1984 through 2012. Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Institute of Teaching Sciences. Retrieved from: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_221.30.asp
vi Stonemason, J.M., Stahl, S. A. , Au, K. H. , & Herman, P. A. (2003). Reading: Children's developing knowledge of words. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire, & J. G. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of enquiry on pedagogy the English language arts (2nd ed., pp. 914-930). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
7 Qian, D. D. (2002). Investigating the Relationship Between Vocabulary Knowledge and Academic Reading Performance: An Assessment Perspective. Linguistic communication Learning, 52(3), 513-536.
8 National Center for Teaching Statistics. (2013). 2013 Vocabulary report. 2013 Reading assessment. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences.
Source: https://www.renaissance.com/2018/01/23/blog-magic-15-minutes-reading-practice-reading-growth/
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