According to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) report, a study carried out every 5 years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Performance (IEA), reading comprehension continues to be one of the pending subjects of the Spanish educational system. The results of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy show worse results: 93 million people in the United States read at a basic level or lower .
The United States is a country with particularly pessimistic figures, since children’s reading comprehension lags behind most Western countries: only a third of them read with the level of comprehension and at the speed that corresponds to their age . If the analysis focuses on children of African or Latino origin, then the percentage is halved.
These reading difficulties are also behind many cases of school dropouts, as noted by former Literate Nation CEO and philanthropist Cinthia Coletti in her book Blueprint for a Literate Nation How You Can Help . Which in turn is also a detriment to the economic level of the entire country.
Disadvantaged families: main disadvantaged
Most of the cases of children with reading comprehension problems come from disadvantaged backgrounds where certain words of a rich vocabulary are never heard or where there is a shortage of books and / or little tradition of reading them.
On top of all this, it is not uncommon for parents not to have read a single book to these children before their fourth or fifth birthday, as the analysis by economist James Heckman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago in Giving Kids has suggested. a Fair Chance : it is class and money that will ultimately have a significant impact on children’s early language and cognitive development.
And it is that reading is not only associated with the development of verbal intelligence (increase in vocabulary), but is also related to non-verbal abilities (reasoning skills).
The critical period to establish the future foundations of reading, therefore, seems to be between 0 and 5 years, that is, the first 2,000 days of life . In the late 1990s, the United States Department of Education conducted one of the largest studies, the ECLS (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study), which established the following correlation: a child with a large number of books at home tends to have better grades than one without them.
Similarly, the next 2,000 days , when children learn to read and schools are in charge of their education, should be strengthened by investing in more comprehensive programs to fill the first gaps in language and learning, before they reach consolidate. This does not mean encouraging children to learn to read early, but rather that they do so when appropriate, after engaging in rich language, shared reading, and other educational elements.
Forcing them to learn to read ahead of time can actually backfire: in a study by reading specialist Usha Goswami and her team, it was suggested that European children who learned to read at the age of five did worse than those in Europe. who started reading at seven.
Therefore, it is imperative to combat the deficit in reading comprehension, but more so to balance the imbalance that exists between disadvantaged families with respect to the most favored ones, and also to continue evaluating the way in which screens may be influencing reading habits .
