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SAR Dean Waters receives $1.2 million federal grant to help struggling readers
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Gloria Waters Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Sargent College Dean Gloria Waters has long been interested in children’s reading problems, and for good reason. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 37 percent of 4th graders and a quarter of 8th and 12th graders can’t read at the basic level.
Seeking to better understand the reasons behind such dire numbers, the U.S. Department of Education is expected soon to award Waters a four-year, $1.2 million grant to conduct research on the reading comprehension problems of students in grades 7 through 10. The award was announced on March 23 by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Tremendous advances have been made in understanding how young children learn how to read, Waters says, but there is less systemic knowledge on how older children acquire the comprehension skills required to be proficient readers. “Most of the research has been on the prerequisites to learning to read and the difficulties some prereaders have making that transition to becoming readers,” she says. “There is also a lot of literature on the early stages of reading, up to fourth grade. That work mainly focuses on decoding skills — kids’ abilities to learn the relationships between letters and sounds.”
However, educators have coined the phrases “fourth grade slump” and “eighth grade cliff” to describe the major stumbling blocks to literacy development in some elementary and middle school children. “The Department of Education put out a request for grant proposals on this particular topic because many children have mastered basic decoding skills — they can read individual words — but they still don’t understand what they’re reading,” Waters says, “and they stay at that inadequate reading level. They don’t progress in terms of their ability to extract information from text.”
The grant, Assessment of Reading Comprehension Skills in Older Struggling Readers, involves the testing of 680 students in the greater Boston area and will allow Waters and her team to develop a new comprehensive computerized language assessment tool to identify various language comprehension problems. The initial test on both written and spoken comprehension will be followed by a random sample of 50 students in each grade to determine the tool’s reliability.
The assessment tool will be unique among those currently available because it will allow educators to distinguish between general language problems and the ones specific to reading, and it will show which aspect of language processing, such as vocabulary, grammar, or passage comprehension, a student is struggling with. The tool will also measure the speed with which a student can comprehend when reading and listening.
“There are many possible reasons why some children have difficulty progressing beyond basic decoding skills,” says Waters, a professor of communications disorders and chair of SAR’s department of health sciences. “One is that their decoding skills are adequate, but not fast and efficient — it still takes them a long time to read words, so they don’t have automatic decoding skills. Another is that they might not have an adequate vocabulary to understand the text, or they might not have adequate world knowledge to relate to the information that they’re reading about, or they might have difficulties drawing inferences from the text — when things aren’t explicitly stated in the text, they can’t determine what the writer is trying to say.”
Before joining Sargent in 1997, Waters was an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal, focusing on problems in the early stages of reading. “Then I realized that this is only a small part of the picture — that children can get to the stage in which they can decode pretty well,” she says, “but that doesn’t ensure that they’ll be good comprehenders.”
Obviously, says Waters, the consequences of not being able to comprehend written materials well by middle school are severe. “If you’re a poor reader, you’re going to fall behind in all areas of school,” she says.
The goal of the study is to allow educators to better identify the children having trouble reading, and target them with focused remedial programs. “This will also help teachers assess whether or not a student’s reading ability improves with concentrated instruction,” she says.
“It’s essential to learn more about why some students have more difficulty than others in comprehending what they read, so that we can take more effective steps to improve their skills,” said Kennedy, who has often emphasized the importance of children’s literacy during his 43 years in the U.S. Senate, when he announced the grant last month. “I commend BU for undertaking this important research, and I look forward to its practical applications in the years ahead.”
8
April 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations