Teachers often assume that once students master decoding in early elementary school, they’re set to shift from learning to read to reading to learn, writes Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book “How the Other Half Learns” (Avery, 2019), in a column in The 74.
But researchers at the Educational Testing Service found evidence of a troubling phenomenon in a 2019 study: Students with weak decoding skills consistently performed poorly on comprehension tasks, and those who surpassed a certain level of decoding ability tended to understand texts much more effectively.
Bottom line: decoding isn’t the only skill older students need to succeed in reading, but those who haven’t yet mastered it are likely to struggle with understanding complex material.
A follow-up study three years later confirmed this finding: Those below the decoding threshold stagnated; those above the line advanced. A recent study put it bluntly: “If children do not have adequate word-recognition skills, their reading comprehension often won’t get better no matter how much direct support for comprehension they receive.”
Multisyllabic decoding in particular seems to hold students back. Students who can decode simple words like “cat” and “bed” still might struggle to break down longer, more complex words into smaller, manageable parts to read them correctly.
This relates to the cognitive load theory: Brainpower spent decoding multisyllabic words is not available to understand the meaning of the text. Plus, students below the decoding threshold stop growing in vocabulary, reading comprehension and knowledge acquisition, while those above it can keep learning and growing, creating a gap with the struggling readers.
This disconcerting finding is compounded by a blind spot in common approaches to teaching reading. “We basically don’t teach [multisyllabic decoding] anywhere in the system because it’s too advanced for second graders. And after second grade, we stop decoding instruction and flip into comprehension and fluency,” says Rebecca Kockler, a former Louisiana state education leader.
“If I had a magic wand, I would pull decoding fluency work up almost into seventh or eighth grade,” she says, while pushing down to early elementary grades the building blocks of multisyllabic decoding, such as morphology and etymology. If you teach kids to break words into their smallest meaningful pieces, like “un-” for “not” or “-ness” for a state of being, they’re more likely to be able to handle “unhappiness” by spotting its parts, for example. And by showing them where words come from — like how “photo” in “photosynthesis” means “light” from Greek — they will be better able to infer what words mean.
As persuasive as the decoding threshold thesis might be, the wish for a magic wand to wave at curriculum and standards hints at a serious problem: There is no immediate or obvious solution at hand to address the issue, writes Pondiscio. A recent RAND survey of teachers in grades 3 to 8 found that 44% of their students “always or nearly always experience difficulty” reading the content of their instructional materials. Many of those teachers also have misconceptions about how students develop word recognition skills.
A set of tech-enabled instructional tools aimed at addressing these issues directly is being tested. In a 12-week pilot in grades K-2 across 11 schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, early results revealed student growth was most pronounced among students starting at the lowest levels of proficiency. K-2 may seem early to address a problem that shows up starkly in eighth grade, but it reflects a growing conviction: unless students start building sophisticated decoding skills while young, and those skills are reinforced often, too many will continue to hit the wall in middle school and never get back up to speed, writes Pondiscio.
The 74
