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Literacy-at-a-Glance
A great number of children and adults struggle with reading.
- Thirty-seven percent of American fourth graders read below the “Basic” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test (NCES, 2003).
- Sixty percent of African-American, 56 percent of Hispanic, and 53 percent of American Indian fourth graders scored below the “Basic” level on the NAEP reading test. Fifty-five percent of fourth graders eligible for free or reduced lunch scored below basic (NCES, 2003).
- A child from a low-income family enters kindergarten with a listening vocabulary of 3,000 words, while a child of a middle-income family enters with a listening vocabulary of 20,000 words (Hart & Risley, 1995).
- Forty million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child (NCES, 1992).
- From 1983 to 1999, over 10 million Americans reached the 12th grade without having learned to read at a basic level. In the same period, over 6 million Americans dropped out of high school (U.S. Department of Education, 1999).
Children need access to books and increased reading motivation.
- Only 45 percent of fourth graders report that they read for fun on a daily basis. Among eighth graders, only 19 percent report daily reading for fun. (NCES, 2003).
- Fourth-graders who reported daily reading for fun scored higher on the NAEP reading test than peers who reported less reading for fun (NCES, 2003).
- Children who score at the 90th percentile on a reading test spent five times as many minutes per day reading books as children at the 50th percentile (Anderson, Wilson & Fielding, 1988).
- Two-thirds of American classrooms have fewer than 50 children’s books, and almost 60 percent of childcare centers buy fewer than one book per child a year (Neuman et. al, 2001).
- Fourth-graders who reported having 25 books or more at home had higher scores on the NAEP reading test than children who reported they didn’t have that many books (NCES, 2003).
- During the summer break, low-income students lose more than two months of reading achievement.
- By the end of fifth grade, low-income children fall more than two years behind their middle-income peers in verbal achievement as a result of summer learning differences.
Families play an important role in their children's reading success.
- Studies of individual families show that what they do to support literacy in the home is more important to student success than family income or education (Ballen & Moles, 1994).
- Reading is more dependent on learning activities in the home than is math or science (College Board, 1994).
- When adults interact with young children—talking, singing and playing rhyming games—they stimulate language and vocabulary development and build important foundations for learning to read (Hart & Risley, 1995).
- Reading to preschoolers is the most important thing families can do to prepare them for reading (Adams, 1990).
- Reading aloud to infants stimulates their brains to create new learning pathways and strengthen existing ones (Shore, 1997).
- Less than half of families read to their kindergarten-age children on a daily basis (West et al., 2000).
- In 1999, only 53 percent of children aged 3 to 5 were read to daily by a family member. Children in families with incomes below the poverty line are less likely to be read aloud to everyday than are children in families with incomes at or above the poverty line (NCES).
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REFERENCES
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Champaign, IL: Center for the Study of Reading.
Anderson, R., Wilson, P., and Fielding, L. (1983). "Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside School." Reading Research Quarterly, 23, pp. 285-303.
Ballen, J., & Moles, O. (1994). Strong Families, Strong Schools: Building Community Partnerships for Learning. National Family Initiative. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
College Board. (1994). College-bound seniors of 1994: Information on students who took the SAT and Achievement tests of the College Board. New York: Author
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes.
National Center for Education Statistics (2001a). NCES Fast Facts, Family Reading. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
National Center for Education Statistics (2001b). NAEP 2000 Reading Report Card. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
National Center for Education Statistics (1999). NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card for the States. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
National Center for Education Statistics (1992). National Adult Literacy Survey. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Neuman, S. B., Celano, D. C., Greco, A. N., & Shue, P. (2001). Access for All: Closing the Book Gap for Children in Early Education. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Shore, R. (1997). Rethinking the brain: New insights into early development. New York: Families and Work Institute.
U.S. Department of Education. (1999). A Nation Still At Risk. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
West, J., Denton, K., and Germino-Hausken, E. (2000). Executive Summary, America's Kindergartners: Findings From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99: Fall 1998. National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
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