3 ways to boost New Brunswick's low literacy rates

You have likely heard renewed discussion around literacy rates in New Brunswick. This time, discussion was ignited by the public release of results from provincial literacy assessments administered to specific grade levels last school year.

Provincially, at the Grade 2 level, results indicate that reading performance is declining, with scores decreasing 2.5 per cent from the previous year.

This downward performance trend is acutely disappointing given that scores for this grade-level were on an upward climb for several years with the percentage of students scoring at appropriate or above achievement levels on assessments increasing by 40 per cent from 2004 to 2010.

Last years results indicate that 22.5 per cent of the 4,922 Grade 2 students registered in the English Prime program scored below appropriate achievement in reading last year, meaning that more than 1,100 Grade 2 students across New Brunswick are at-risk of reading failure.

This number is cause for great concern and should sound a call to action. Below I outline just a few core reasons why we need to act now.

I conclude by outlining how we can address these early literacy challenges since the future of New Brunswick quite literally depends on strengthening our education and early childhood system and significantly boosting literacy rates.

Why is Grade 2 literacy achievement so powerful?

1.Learning to read is a developmental process that begins long before school entry.

Research clearly demonstrates that most emergent literacy skills children exhibit in the preschool years, such as knowing letter names and rhyming sounds, are predictive of how well a child will fare in learning to read once in school.

Many children learn these emergent skills implicitly while interacting with adults in their home and care environments through talk, nursery rhymes, and songs, and by observing others engaged in reading and writing activities.

These experiences literally wire and prime children cognitively for more advanced, formalized reading activities in school. Children not exposed to such language-rich environments, however, often do not develop many foundational emergent literacy skills, and, consequently, are at-risk of experiencing difficulty in learning to read once in school.

2. Reading trajectories are established early and are resistant to change.

The Grade 2 reading assessment was administered to students at the end of the 2013-2014 school year. While the average childs reading development will continue to increase after this time point, the developmental pathway, or learning trajectory, exhibited by each student is unlikely to change much without targeted intervention and support.

As such, children exhibiting relatively flat reading development trajectories will likely continue to have limited reading gains throughout their schooling, while children exhibiting steep upward reading trends will likely continue to exhibit, and enjoy, significant reading, and consequently learning, growth. Researchers can in fact now predict, based on Grade 2 reading scores, how well a child will read as an adult.

We know, for instance, that children lacking sufficient reading skills at the end of Grade 1 have an 88 per cent likelihood of remaining below grade level after three additional years of instruction.

3. Increased literacy demands

Literacy demands have heightened given the fast-paced, technology-driven world and workplaces, in which we must now operate along with the many children who also now use technology in their personal, socialand school environments.

The ability to use technology is, fundamentally, a literacy-based activity given how often we now communicate using email, Twitter, blogs and a host of other online networks.

The capacity to write clearly, effectively, and often persuasively in online environments has become an essential skill many can attest, for instance, that crafting a compelling tweet in only 140 characters is not an easy task.

Reading, writing and creating emails in a time-efficient manner that are professional, clear and often persuasive or strategic is part of the daily routine in most workplaces.

Equally, effectively using the Internet to gather, analyze, consolidate, and share information also requires heightened literacy demands and skills.

3 ways to improve literacy levels

Effectively teaching more New Brunswick children to read early and well is crucial and it is the only way our province will see elevated adult literacy levels.

Below, I briefly set out a three-pronged evidence-based framework for teaching reading in the early years that will enable more children to learn to read.

The first and perhaps most critical element of an effective early reading instruction framework is the need for pre-kindergarten-to-Grade 3 teachers to have specialized professional development in teaching young children to read.

There is a substantial science behind how children learn to read, established both in the educational and neurological research literatures, that teachers working with these critical grade-levels must understand as part of high-quality, effective early reading instruction.

Regular, ongoing professional development, responsive to evolving research- and field-based research findings, is a critical component.

Second, a system of continuous monitoring to assist teachers in the early identification and remediation of children experiencing reading difficulties is essential.

A five-year pilot study examining such a monitoring system was successfully piloted in the mid-2000s by University of New Brunswick researchers Elizabeth Sloat, Joan Beswick and Doug Willms.

While the provincial government adopted one component of the system developed by the team an early years monitoring measure there is still the need to adopt the entire process of regularly collecting student performance data at defined incremental periods using valid, reliable early literacy measures essential for wide-scale reading success among New Brunswick students.

A third, and related, element is the need for educators and schools to have a high level of assessment literacy for reading, interpreting and responding to data that is in turn supported by relevant teaching and intervention approaches.

Research indicates, however, that this is a very difficult process for even highly qualified and experienced reading teachers to sustain with only one educator alone in a classroom.

Education investments are necessary if we are to ensure that teachers and schools can respond appropriately to the data they collect using a carefully designed monitoring and targeted response system.

This framework, if adequately resourced, would help ensure more New Brunswick students are on-track for reading well by the end of Grade 3.

A chief benefit of such a system means we would no longer rely, as we now do, on provincial assessments administered only at key grade points throughout the school years to know how well children in our province can read.

Importantly, such a framework would provide the support teachers need for excelling as early reading educators. In terms of literacy, New Brunswick has nothing to lose; we must act quickly.