Addressing the Middle School Reading Crisis: Urgent Need for Foundational Decoding Interventions

The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) is often referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card.” The NAEP provides information on how students are performing in a variety of subjects, including reading. For decades, the NAEP for reading has been administered to students in grades 4, 8, and 12, providing a snapshot of how these students are comprehending grade-level informational and literary texts. The most recent reading assessment for eighth graders (13-year-olds) was administered in 2022. The results showed that approximately 69% of eighth graders assessed were not yet proficient readers that year. Four points lower than pre-pandemic NAEP data from 2019, these results serve as a reminder of the negative impacts of the instructional disruptions associated with COVID-19.

Students entering fifth through ninth grade in the fall of 2024 were in kindergarten through fourth grade when COVID-19 hit. As the pandemic spread in March of 2020, schools closed their doors and launched hastily patched-together remote instruction. Young learners finished the school term and the next full school year at home, receiving only a fraction of the instruction, teacher interaction, and academic support they required. For many, learning stalled. For many younger elementary students, the foundations of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency) were never fully mastered. For many older elementary students, critical reading skills were never fully developed, practiced, or deepened to a level of reading proficiency. Many on-level readers before COVID-19 have now slipped below grade-level reading expectations, and many learners who were already below grade level pre-pandemic are now significantly behind in reading abilities.

As of August 2024, middle school is about to begin for millions of students who never fully transitioned to the “learning to read” phase of their education journey. This fall, middle school teachers for ELA, math, social studies, and science will enter classrooms that include students who will not be able to read or understand the texts associated with their curriculums. For many of these students, a lack of comprehension reflects an underlying deficit in fundamental decoding skills that should have been developed and mastered by fourth grade.

As the table below shows, the cascading effect of missed skill development leaves many of our current middle schoolers lacking basic decoding skills, which means they are unprepared for the rigors of grade-level reading.

Decoding is critical for comprehension. In 2019, researchers Wang, Sabatini, O’Reilly & Weeks[1] published the results of a longitudinal research study that examined reading skill data for more than 30,000 students in fifth through tenth grade. The researchers found that students across all grade levels who scored below a specific threshold in word-decoding ability showed almost no increase in reading comprehension ability over three consecutive school years. This study suggests that students who do not have word-reading skills at or above the “decoding threshold” do not fully benefit from comprehension-focused instruction or intervention. This research also suggests that many students heading into middle school this fall will need to focus on improving decoding skills before they can improve comprehension and achieve reading proficiency.

The daunting problem uncovered by Wang et al is compounded by the fact that middle school educators often lack a background in teaching foundational reading skills and the age-appropriate resources to effectively meet the needs of striving middle school students who have foundational skill gaps. Yet middle school students require immediate, targeted, research-aligned foundational reading intervention to efficiently address their reading deficiencies.

Middle school teachers need a solution that will quickly close gaps in essential reading skills, first building mastery of decoding and then improving comprehension. The solution should be easy-to-implement and include soft-scripted lessons for effective foundational reading instruction (structured step-by-step lesson formats can be particularly helpful for teachers who may not have experience teaching foundational reading skills). Most important, the instruction must respect the older ages of striving middle school learners, engaging them with age-appropriate content while building background knowledge and vocabulary, and setting them on a new path of increased reading confidence and academic success.   

[1] Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O’Reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387–401. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302