In 1936, Mabel Vogel Morphett and Carleton Washburne wrote When Should Children Begin to Read? a research paper published in The Elementary School Journal.
This is a critical question because if children are pushed to read before they’re ready, they might not get it, then hate it, fail to read later and decide that reading is more trouble than it’s worth.
For twenty-two years, mainly since NCLB, learning to read has been pushed down to younger ages, with higher expectations not only for preschoolers and kindergartners but also for third graders in danger of retention if they don’t pass a reading test.
Morphett and Washburne were concerned about the age at which they should teach reading so that children wouldn’t have a distaste for the subject.
They examined 141 first graders’ intelligence, providing them with twenty-one steps of reading material and looking at sight word scores and mental ages as measured by the Detroit and Stanford-Binet Tests, with moderate to high correlations—enough to be believable and important.
Stanford-Binet test results indicated that children would gain considerably in speed of learning if they could wait until they had attained a mental age of seven years and six months before beginning to read.
By curving results, they also found that children taking the Detroit Test with mental ages of six years and six months made progress practically as satisfactory as those with higher mental ages.
So they deemed six years and six months the breaking point in the curve, that is, the point beyond which postponing the teaching of reading yields little gain.
It seems that six and a half is the sweet spot, the age to start teaching formal reading, which is when most schools used to start.
Also, the study looked at mental, not chronological age (how old a child is). Most schools today don’t consider mental ages because they’re connected to Intelligent Quotients, which have generated valid concerns over the years.
What this means, of course, is that some first graders could be six and have mental ages on the high side of seven or eight, and others the lower side of age four or below. In both cases, the instruction to effectively teach each child would be different.
Astute teachers recognize such contrasts and adjust their lessons, especially if they have class sizes that are small enough. But today, more often, we see children seated together, watching teachers teach direct instruction. It looks like one-size-fits-all, and one wonders how each child is learning.
Sadly, also, formal reading instruction has become a big part of the kindergarten experience for kindergartners, mostly five. I’m not talking about simple prereading skills, but full blown reading instruction with the expectations that children be reading by first grade!
Today, the pressure for children to read early is paramount in school and at home. This pressure can easily be found on social media, with parents and educators arguing about the Science of Reading and how to teach children sounds, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. There are many rules and voices about the right and wrong way to teach reading.
Few consider a child’s age or readiness.
It’s always hard to know why a child is failing at reading because we don’t have access to assessments and information. We aren’t clear if they have a disability or needed a little more time. Parents conditioned for early reading to take place, don’t always appreciate the more time reason.
And the fear of third grade failure and retention is real. Parents know if their children fail third grade it will change their lives dramatically, and the child might eventually drop out of school.
So it isn’t any wonder that teachers and parents drill preschoolers and kindergartners to sound out letters and expect them to sit in groups and listen with little questioning about whether children are ready to learn to read.
Note, too, that when children at the chronological age of five, and also those with lower mental ages, fail to read, teachers and public schools look like they’re failing.
Google Scholar shows that the above study has been cited 513 times, including about 40 since 2020. It needs to be clarified if these are favorable citations, but the study seems sound despite a relatively small sample size and the limitations of the single school source. It would be interesting to hear about follow-up studies or replications.
Meanwhile, experts often say children should read when they’re developmentally ready, but that can be unclear.
For example, U.S. News and World Report (2021) also asked: When Do Kids Learn to Read? Distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, former director of reading for Chicago Public Schools, and member of the National Reading Panel, Timothy Shanahan said:
These days, kindergarten reading skills are pretty universal. There is no particular age at which one has to learn to read, but starting early provides the greatest opportunity for children’s success.
Shanahan doesn’t elaborate on what starting early means. Parents may think formal, rigorous instruction is important, so they turn to online reading programs, of which there are many, even for preschoolers, programs promising reading success for three-year-olds or younger.
I’m not talking about reading lovely picture books to children they enjoy. Research increasingly indicates that even reading such books to babies can be helpful. Or talking with children, teaching alphabet sounds, or helping them with vocabulary words in a relaxed fashion.
Creating a rich and enjoyable literacy and language environment for children differs from organized, pressurized instruction, directly teaching letters and sounds, or sending a child online to learn, with serious before-and-after assessments.
Think how frustrating it must be for kindergartners and preschoolers when they likely would have an easier time of it later.
However, many parents and teachers are now conditioned to believe that if students aren’t reading by first grade, they didn’t get the help they needed, and as children fall further behind at each grade level, they may hate reading even more.
It’s unlikely to change since kindergarten is a full day now, and teachers must fill up the time and are under pressure to get kids reading earlier.
What’s done now is to push all preschoolers and kindergarteners to read ages three, four, and five and few are questioning whether maybe they’d do better and have an easier time of learning to read if formal reading instruction began at age six and a half.
This study ultimately showed that children with the mental ages of six years and six months and seven years learned to read satisfactorily. Isn’t this worth considering?
Reference
Morphett, M. V., & Washburne, C. (1931). When Should Children Begin to Read? The Elementary School Journal, 31(7), 496–503. https://doi.org/10.1086/456609
I’ve met two types of Kinder teachers:
1. Reading takes K-2 to learn as we have to teach them strategies such as looking at the pictures and guessing at words. It can be a very long process, but don’t worry, your child is “on level”. This gets repeated for 3 years until they hit 3rd grade and promptly fail the state literacy test.
2. Kids who come in knowing letters and sound will be reading by Christmas and those who don’t know letters and sounds will be reading by the end of the year. These students go on to pass the state literacy tests.
Some of our children got school #1 and some got school #2. It was a night/day difference until we moved them all to school #2. Now they are all flourishing avid readers. On track to dyslexia to reading chapter books in less than a school year. This isn’t rocket science, just let Nora Chahbazi, a real person with real experience teaching literacy instead of trusting all these curriculum writers.
I don’t think you understand the importance of understanding a child’s development. Perhaps the children you mention have higher mental ages.
Your comments unfortunately are anecdotal.
I am a longtime retired teacher of students with reading disabilities and have a degree in that area.
Nora, last I looked, is selling a program, and I believe she was trained as a nurse.
In addition, like so many programs, there’s no research I’ve seen that what she proposes works. But please share if you have any.
Also, if what Nora does helps children to be better readers I am glad, but this push to make children read so early is a real concern for many reasons.
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What is wrong with a system if it works 100% of the time? That’s like criticizing Kimberly Nix Berens simply because she has a system available.
This reminds me of people who will only take their cars to the dealership because they think that’s where the best mechanics are.
Anyhow, Nora makes practically all her knowledge available online for free. It didn’t cost me a dime to implement her methods and help our children and others. EBLI has a free webinar coming up if you’re interested. I’m always excited to hear from Dr. Mark Seidenberg. I like his opinion on when kids should learn to read.(no hard set age)
https://eblireads.com/
What you’re promoting is worrisome, and I’m curious if you’re advertising for Nora. I almost didn’t post this, but I wish to make a point. As I said, your comments are all based on anecdotal information.
Like many others, I support a democratic public school system in which accredited universities play a crucial role in preparing educators, and the community has a stake in its schools. This system has long been under siege by those seeking to privatize and, in my view, commercialize schools that should be freely accessible to all.
Nora has been involved with those who see $$$.
Her program is definitely not totally free, and while she advertises evidence that it works, I have no idea if it does, other than more anecdotal information, much like the Science of Reading advocates.
https://eblireads.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Pricing-and-Materials-for-Trainings-1.pdf
I see her as attempting to discredit real teachers by connecting with nonprofits that are also anti-public schooling..
While public schools are being defunded and teachers pushed out of the classroom, anyone with or without a credible degree is claiming reading miracles.
https://nancyebailey.com/2021/10/14/the-truth-about-reading-is-missing-truths-and-backstory/
She trains public and private school teachers, so I don’t think she cares as long as more people learn to read properly.
Our kids went to a public school whose district banned 3 cueing in 2019.
The district did everything right, but didn’t account for a principal who believed so wholeheartedly in 3 cueing that she implemented Lucy Calkins units of study in secret without anyone knowing it. She fired all the OG and Spalding trained teachers and only brought in “experts” in 3 cueing. This had a dramatic horrible effect on our youngest 2 children as they were in Kinder and 1st at this time.
Anyways, with Lucy being banished and 3 cueing being scrapped across the country public schools have a chance to compete again. Who in their right mind would send their kids to a public school with terrible literacy scores if there is an alternative nearby?
There is an easy solution for public schools, crush the competition instead of making excuses. Lucy Calkins and 3 cueing caused people to blame parents, socioeconomics, age, dyslexia, etc. instead of the real problem. People didn’t know what they were doing. It’s pretty sad that I can use the full set of Bob Books and teach a kid to read in a week while there are still some kinder teachers out there who can’t get it done in a year. Orthographic mapping while protecting the child from a phonic they haven’t learned yet is such an easy practice.
Before you start making excuses for public schools, know that I went to a reservation school that had an 8% passing rate on the state graduation test for math. In one year it increased to 27% and the football team won 400% more games than in the past. Almost everyone had the mindset that there was no way to compete with the nicer school up the hill and that failure would always be the norm. Stop blaming politics, agendas, etc. and just kick the competition’s butt. If the public school has better scores than the local charter, no one is going to send their kids there, end of story.
Not all schools and teachers are great. But public schools serve the majority of America’s children, and they deserve to be well-funded and improved when necessary. They are the last democratic public institution. Most private and charter schools lack transparency.
If you want to see how competition worked check out the news out of New Orleans with their charter schools, schools that left out the children who needed special ed. There are many outstanding public schools especially in wealthy areas, but policies like NCLB and ESSA have been terrible for schools, especially the poor.
Oops, accidentally cut out the beginning of my comment.
I’ve met many parents who taught their children to read at age 3 instead of relying on the kinder teachers. I’ve never met any parents who tried to teach their children to read before kinder and failed. The ones taught early were all successful and the ones left to the system were mostly determined by the skill level of the kinder teacher.
Worth mentioning: Formal reading instruction in Finland– which routinely tops international reading comparisons– begins when students are 7. Until then, it’s all rhymes and read-alouds, and letter sounds. Finland used research on the optimum time to begin formal reading instruction, and chose to begin at what we see as “second grade” (a year before kids in America can be retained, for not reading at the third grade level).
Thanks, Nancy. I appreciate the reminder. That would go along with the idea that 7 is a good age, as noted in the study.
“Until then, it’s all rhymes and read-alouds, and letter sounds”
All rhymes, and read-alouds, and letter sounds.
Rhymes. Read alouds. Letter sounds.
Are you all getting it yet?
You might want to read up on how Finland does it, Brian. They don’t ignore reading, they simply don’t begin formal instruction. By the way, they learned this, I’m told, from us. Go figure.
Letter sounds. Seems like the right place to start, no?
I wonder if there’s some kind of technical term for starting to learn how to read by learning letter sounds…
Phonics, perhaps. Children hear letter sounds all the time when they are very young, and later, and one reason why talking to babies is so important. There have been some studies looking at benefits of reading to babies.
I can’t generalize my situation to others but I learned phonics in third grade. We had charts. My teacher would have all of us read the sounds and blends reminding us what they were in unison. We did plenty of reading skills at this time and writing, and had to learn a list of words on Monday with a test on Friday. It worked for me.
Thanks for your comments, Brian. I may not always agree but I appreciate the conversation.
Interesting discussion – If you have a copy of Patrick Shannon’s Progressive Reading Education in America, take a look at pages 58 -63 in which he cites some examples that you may find of interest.
Two things missing from the “this is the one best way to teach reading” discussion are 1) the fact that humans are all different, learn different ways, and develop at different rates. One size does NOT fit all. And…
2) Poverty. We know that poverty has an impact on learning. Even if there was one, definitive, “best” way to teach anything, poverty would still get in the way.
Well said, Stu. Thanks. I think one of the issues is determining when children struggle due to a learning disability as they are learning to read. The push is to figure this out early, but unless one knows disabilities already exist, it is often hard to determine if the child is simply learning. Parents today, have been convinced, however, I’m afraid, that kindergarten is that time for all children.
Saw this presentation by Spencer Russell. He’s very successful at teaching toddlers to read.
Tom, you might want to find some real reading teachers and education or child development academics to hang out with. Seriously, I understand you care about this and I recommend some child development books like Dr. Penelope Leach or Dr. T. Barry Brazelton.
Spencer Russell is from Teach for America, not a real teacher. No actual university preparation in this area that I can find,, and he’s an entrepreneur who makes money on his Toddler teaching program.
He taught for a while at KIPP Charter. Check out Jim Horn’s book about them.
Do you understand how troubling this is for toddlers who may not learn, whose parents will then believe their children have problems learning to read? To make parents believe they can teach their toddlers to read, and what pressure does that involve? And why?
He’s also with Unbound Ed., a nonprofit featured in Nora’s documentary. mostly more folks with little education backgrounds who have not studied reading or actually taught students.
I just ran across this. I like it. So, I thought I’d share.
https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/how-to-teach-toddler-to-read#activities
Wow, nevermind, I change my mind, F*#@ this Spencer guy, he’s a quack.
Well, he got some experience and figured out a way to market it. There’s a lot of folks out there who do this.
Look, Tom. I’m not against sounds or decoding at all. I taught Morphograph spelling Direct Instruction to middle and high schoolers, and there were some students that truly should have had more intense decoding when they were in elementary.
And for fun I’d give my own child those prereading skill books now and then for fun when they were little. We’d play school. I do think though that very young children learn a lot of sounds by talking a lot, hearing what they say, writing, and hearing books that rhyme etc. And some will need more instruction than less.
Not pushing reading skills early or making it pressure is where I get off the boat. Have a good day. And thanks for commenting. You keep me on my toes.