Which grade is most important to a child’s development?

Pamela Mason is senior lecturer in education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-chair of the Teaching and Teacher Leadership Program.

As a literacy researcher, practitioner, and former school principal, I would say that every year is the most important year in a child’s life. When children start out in preschool or kindergarten, they’re so excited about learning and having teachers and friends who they learn with and from. In kindergarten, they learn some pre-reading skills. In first grade, they’re very excited about learning to read, and they start reading a little bit independently with picture books. As they grow older, they are excited about using their reading to learn about other things. All that learning is foundational to literacy because as children are learning to sound out words and attach letters to sounds, they learn to read and write whole words. They also learn to make meaning from both what they’re reading and what they’re writing.

When they move to third grade, that is when we see children make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, which is why some experts see this grade as pivotal. Literacy pioneer Jeanne Chall wrote the book “Stages of Reading Development,” in which she made that fairly bright line between learning to read and reading to learn. Another reason why third grade is important is because it’s mandated that the students be tested objectively in third grade in many states. We don’t have a national test in the United States, and in some states and some districts, if children don’t meet a certain score on the third-grade test, they may be retained.

There is a lot of focus on the instruction in third grade, and a lot of anxiety on the part of parents. Even though the test is given in third grade, the third-grade teachers can’t teach everything that the children need to know to be successful. It’s a group effort from kindergarten, first, and second, into third grade. The learning and love of learning and student success start in kindergarten, and it’s as much about what a child knows as it is how the child is motivated to know and learn.

Although Chall coined the “learning to read, reading to learn” statement, children are reading to learn before third grade. However, at third grade more of the disciplinary learning comes from being engaged in written text.

The National Assessment of Education Progress and the National Research Council have done reports that show that third grade is a predictor of future academic achievement, high school graduation, and career success. They have the statistics. It just feels that you’re dooming a young learner on the basis of a test score, and I’ve seen children who didn’t do well in third grade and, after getting the extra support that they need, become very successful. I know that there are people building prisons on the basis of third-grade scores in communities, and it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Professionally and personally, that makes me uncomfortable.

In many schools across the country, there are available resources to help third-graders who are struggling. Schools can use reading specialists, who can be supportive of both the teacher and the learners, and literacy coaches who work primarily with the teachers, so they can help the teachers differentiate their instruction, provide some review and reinforcement instruction for children who don’t seem to be moving along at the expected pace. I always tell my literacy interns that their job is to put themselves out of a job; that they work one-on-one with struggling readers to give them the support and strategies to access the curriculum in the classroom and then their intervention work is done.

— As told to Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer