‘Kids want to read harder stuff’

Average reading scores for fourth-grade students in 2024 dropped two points since 2022 and five points since 2019, as measured by the so-called nation’s report card. But according to a recent talk at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, the trend of American children reading below their grade levels stretches back decades before the pandemic — and teaching methods that fail to adequately challenge students, counterintuitive as it may seem, could be the culprit.

“Look at data all the way back, starting in 1969. We’ve never improved,” said educator Timothy Shanahan, author of “Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students’ Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It.” “While the need for literacy has been increasing over the last five decades, kids’ literacy has not improved in the United States.”

The problem, said Shanahan, who joined Ed School Dean Nonie K. Lesaux for the Gutman Library Virtual Book Talk, is rooted in an outdated premise. “There’s been a theory in reading education for about 100 years that if we’re going to be successful, we have to teach students at their level.” After years of testing ideas about “what ‘their level’ meant,” he said, educators arrived at a kind of consensus: Students are asked to read supposed grade-level passages and are then tested on their comprehension of them.

The problem with that approach is that it lacks challenge. “There’s nothing for the kids to learn,” said Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, where he is founding di­rector of the UIC Center for Literacy.

The solution Shanahan outlined is to challenge students — but give them the right tools and support. For example, he proposed stopping the common practice of “pre-teaching” the vocabulary of a text before students try to read it. “We’re teaching words that are defined in the text. We’re teaching words you could figure out in context.” The result is that “kids are not seeing the text as something to be solved.”

“I don’t think kids enjoy it very much, and they’re not learning reading,” said Shanahan. “They’re just accumulating words.”

“We assume they’re de-motivated by difficulty. But research shows they’re de-motivated by the reading instruction.”

Questioning past assumptions is key. “We assume they’re de-motivated by difficulty,” he said. “But research shows they’re de-motivated by the reading instruction,” which, he stressed, can come across as “pretty babyish.”

Shanahan identified four basic concepts students learn in order to read: words and parts of words (morphology); fluency, which he defined as “where to pause and where to put emphasis” while reading; comprehension, or a grasp of an entire text; and writing, the ability to create texts on their own.

To master these, students must tackle texts that “pose linguistic or cognitive challenges,” he said.

“That might mean figuring out unknown words or figuring out sentences of complexity. What do you do with pronouns? What if there are too many pronouns? You want texts that are going to pose problems for kids.”

Instead of simply focusing on reading ability when choosing texts, teachers must look for content that will be interesting or engaging, or that has some social connection.

“Kids want to read harder stuff,” Shanahan said. Looking back on his beginners, he noted, “Even the lowest readers took on ‘Harry Potter,’” which mattered to their peer group. “Everybody wanted to be part of it.”

“We shouldn’t be trying to limit what kids take on,” he said. Instead, teachers and librarians should encourage readers to try new books, and offer them alternatives if what they first attempted proves too hard. “There’s nothing shameful in that,” he said. “We don’t want them afraid.”

Throughout the talk, Shanahan referred to the theories of Soviet Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which emphasize learning through social interaction and making connections between prior knowledge and new information. Vygotsky, who studied children’s educational development, championed the idea of “scaffolding,” basically supporting learners so they can reach for a higher level on their own. The theory works for adults too, Shanahan said, as he discovered when he joined a group to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“I’d read it twice on my own. The first time I got nothing. The second time I felt I got a theme — one important but tiny theme in the book,” said Shanahan. With the group, he got much more out of this difficult text. “I needed a lot of support to read that book. It was a problem to be solved.”

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