US students recover reading skills after pandemic losses
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American students in kindergarten through eighth grade improved their reading scores, beginning to close learning gaps that widened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The education research organization NWEA analyzed student data and found they recovered about one-third of the academic ground lost since the start of the pandemic. Megan Kuhfeld, a growth model and analysis director at NWEA, stated the improvement is meaningful after four years of stalled reading progress.
Experts attribute this recovery to the increasing adoption of “the science of reading” in schools across the United States. Roughly half of US states have now enacted laws or adopted educational standards aligning instruction with this approach. “The science of reading” focuses on phonics, teaching students the relationship between letters and sounds, and also emphasizes vocabulary and comprehension. This method differs from “balanced literacy,” which previously encouraged students to guess words based on context clues rather than decoding individual sounds.
While reading scores are improving, it remains uncertain if this trend will continue, as reading achievement plateaued in the US between 2013 and the pandemic, coinciding with the rise of social media.
