Research With A Primary Focus

Changing literacy scores

In the 2006 PIRLS survey of reading, the mean score for ten year olds in England and Scotland on tests of reading achievement were higher than the mean for the age group as a whole over all 40 countries involved.  But this survey also shows that since the previous one in 2001, scores and international rankings in reading have fallen in both countries - in Scotland by an insignificant single point (528 to 527) and in England by a highly significant 14 points (553 to 539).   It shows too that our children's attitudes to reading are significantly less positive than those of most other countries and have declined significantly since 2001.
(Mullis et al., 2007, to be found at http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls2006/intl_rpt.html)

Student teachers need to be aware of these findings.  The countries involved include some developing countries as well as most of the countries in the developed world, (but not Wales or Northern Ireland).  The tests involved are subtle and searching.  Both literary and informational reading are assessed, and in both, comprehension is measured in terms of retrieving and straightforward inferencing on the one hand, and interpreting, integrating and evaluating on the other. 

The relatively poor (and sliding) scores on these tests of children in England indicate that we have problems not likely to be cured by an intense focus on the early stages of word recognition.  It should also be noted that the study shows ten-year-olds in both England and Scotland to have a wider gender gap (at 19 and 22 points respectively) than those in most other countries.  

However both countries have a significant number of high achievers: in Scotland 10% of the students tested scored at or above the Advanced International Benchmark and 15% did so in England, both better than the international average of 9%.  These children showed that they could make interpretations of figurative language, understand the function of organisational features, integrate information across texts and provide full text-based support for their observations.  Yet for both countries these scores represent a drop since the 2001 assessment - of 1 percentage point for Scotland and 5 for England.  We have a diminishing number of highly effective readers among our ten-year-olds.

Meanwhile, in both Scotland and England, 7% of the children tested failed to achieve the lowest of the four international benchmarks, an increase of one percentage point in each case over the 2001 figure. These children did not manage to meet the requirement of recognising, locating and reproducing explicitly stated details, (even those close to the beginning of the text), and drawing straightforward inferences.  Although this figure is better than the international average of 11%, it is much higher than the figures for similarly developed countries.  We still have far too long a tail of underachievement in the UK.

The low and falling number of children, in both England and Scotland, who take pleasure in reading is another real cause for concern. The 2006 figure for ten-year-olds in Scotland is 42%, down from 47% in 2001.  In England the 2006 figure is 40%, down from 44% in 2001.  This cannot be simply attributed to the many electronic games available to children in the UK: children in Germany, France and Spain score significantly higher in terms of attitude to reading.  And attitude matters: as the report.s authors observe:

In PIRLS 2001 and again in PIRLS 2006, students with the most positive attitudes to reading had the highest reading achievement.  In PIRLS 2006, internationally, about half the students (49%), on average, agreed with five statements about enjoying reading and appreciating books.
(Mullis et al., 2007, p. 6)

It is worth considering that it may be productive to place more emphasis on pleasure in reading, since increasing children's liking for reading may contribute positively to their effectiveness as readers.  Children who like reading read more get better at it.

      Much other information - about such matters as the children's social circumstances, their parents' education levels and reading practices, classroom organisation and activities and the preparation of teachers in the 40 countries - is included in this very important study.  

Implications 
In the UK in general and in England in particular we have an unusually large number of low-scoring school students.  Such an incidence of low achievement should not be accepted as inevitable; teachers need high expectations of all, and a clear awareness of how low-scoring children can be helped forward. 

We should also ensure that we give sufficient attention to developing reading comprehension, engagement and confidence from the earliest stages, alongside word identification.  We should also stress the need to develop positive attitudes to reading (and writing), and awareness of the ways in which this can best be achieved.

The attitudes to reading of children in England's primary schools have declined in recent years
(Sainsbury et al., 1998; Sainsbury and Schagen, 2004)

This study was prompted by the unfavourable attitudes to reading of England's ten year olds in 2001, revealed in the PIRLS survey cited above, which Sainsbury and Schagen found to be markedly different from those recorded for primary children in Years 4 and 6, in a survey carried out in England by Sainsbury et al. in 1998.   In the earlier study, carried out before the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, attitudes towards reading were found to be generally positive, although those of the Year 6 children were rather less so.  

The 2004 study shows a significant increase in confidence since 1998, but also a significant fall in enjoyment of reading.  While the authors state that other explanations may be possible, they point to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy (and its successor the Primary National Strategy) as a likely cause for these changes.

Implication
We should ensure that our student teachers experience reading as a pleasurable and useful activity, that they strive ceaselessly to communicate this to school students and that they become thoroughly familiar with texts of interest to those they are teaching and with ways of engaging their students with them.
 

.     Under-achievement is associated with the incidence of poverty but can be mitigated by good education.
(Lake, 1991; Gorman and Fernandes, 1992; Parsons and Bynner, 1998; Hansen and Joshi, 2007; Mullis et al., 2007; Sylva et al., 2008; Frater, 2009)

During an earlier period of intense controversy about the teaching of reading, when the lines were drawn between proponents of the 'real books' approach and champions of reading schemes, Michael Lake, Chief Educational Psychologist for Buckinghamshire, undertook an analysis of the data he held for Buckingham.s primary schools, to identify the factors that appeared to contribute to success.  Contrary to the views of most of the participants in the debate, he found that reading success correlated not with the approach adopted by the school, but with two other features.  One was the newness of the approach: new approaches were correlated with lower reading scores (and in this study more schools had changed from 'real books' to reading schemes) and the other was the incidence of children receiving free school dinners, used then, as it still is, as an indication of poverty.  The more children on the free school dinner register, the lower the school.s mean score.

Following this pioneering study, and in a context of increasingly vocal public concern about falling reading scores, Gorman and Fernandes reported on the survey of children.s reading carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research, involving a representative sample of schools all over England, whose test results in 1991 were compared with those of a comparable survey in 1987. 

The results showed a drop in performance over the period (although this appeared not to be universal), and they cite other data to show that this decline began in the mid eighties. This they connect to the increase in one-parent families that became very evident at about the same time and the increase in the number of children living in poverty.  They found no evidence of a substantial change in approaches to teaching reading that would explain this fall in test scores.  But the increase in low achievers over the period studied almost exactly mirrored the increase in child poverty experienced in Britain at that time.  Having intended originally to give their study a different title, they decided, just before publication, to name it Reading in Recession (Gorman and Fernandes, 1992).

Frater (2009) presents a useful interpretive account of recent research in this area.  One source he cites is the meticulously detailed British cohort study of children born in 1958, quoting the conclusions of Parsons and Bynner (1998):

Of all the factors impinging on young children's educational potential, the material circumstances of family life are probably the most crucial.
(Parsons and Bynner, 1998)

This link continues.  Writing of the succeeding cohort study, of children born in 2000, Hansen and Joshi (2007) conclude from the children's diverging scores on school entry:

The results show marked differences between children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds. Better cognitive scores were achieved by children from families with two working parents who were highly educated and had higher incomes.
(Hansen and Joshi, 2007)

This connection is not peculiar to the UK: the authors of the report on the 2006 PIRLS survey state:

Internationally, the reading achievement of students in schools with few disadvantaged students (no more than 10%) was much higher (56 scale score points, more than half a standard deviation) than for students with a high percentage of disadvantaged classmates (more than 50% disadvantaged economically).
(Mullis et al., 2007, p.11)

But these very real handicaps can be mitigated, at least, by good education.  The British EPPE project, (Sylva et al., 2008), another longitudinal study, examines effective practice from pre-school to post-primary education.  It too has found socio-economic status (SES) powerfully linked with achievement. But other factors also make a difference.  Effective pre-school provision can have a persistent influence, significantly reducing the consequences of disadvantage.  Primary school teaching matters too.  By Year 5:

- the influence of overall teaching quality on Maths and Reading outcomes is stronger than the net influence of some background factors such as gender and family disadvantage (measured by eligibility for free school meals.)
(Sylva et al., 2008).

Happily, despite the effects of the recent recession, rather fewer children are living in poverty in the UK than were in the early 1990s, when the earlier studies cited above were carried out.  But both EPPE (Sylva et al., 2008) and Mullis et al. (2007) show there is still a real problem, one which is unlikely to disappear in the near future.

Implication
We should certainly ensure our student teachers are fully aware of the link between poverty and low achievement.  But we should also make sure they know what can be done in the classroom to combat low achievement.  Since the earlier studies were carried out, we have learnt more about effective teaching.  So we should see that our student teachers do not use the poverty of children.s homes as an excuse for inactivity and low expectations.