US Literacy Statistics 2022-2023
thenationalliteracyinstitute.com
thenationalliteracyinstitute.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
Ivy admissions standards may continue to conform to the mean literacy level, if subtly and gradually.
The students described in the article would have been in the bottom-third of a prep school class in the 1990's. Their options would have been limited to State schools or lesser but expensive Liberal Arts colleges with lax admissions standards.
It doesn't square not to be able to read a better book, within a restricted period, and to have higher verbal intelligence. The former is the primary training method for the latter.
Literacy and verbal intelligence development requires training that can't be duplicated outside of book reading. Most quality students will have been devouring (any) books since primary school. The Calvin and Hobbes enjoyer in third grade, or earlier, is the LoTR enjoyer in seventh. Is then the Crime and Punishment reader in secondary. That type of literacy progression is generally impossible to skip.
Circling-back to the cited problem of the Op: the infant who is frequently read and spoken to is the early Calvin and Hobbes enjoyer.
I think that state-funded packages of age-appropriate books, annually delivered to all parents perhaps until their child is in pre-school, would be a better than normal use of welfare funds. As it would widely benefit society. A trick to the continuity of such a program would be to keep partisans away from demanding that the books be in any way politicized content.
According to state standardized tests administered from grades 3 to 11, half the kids in San Francisco cannot read at grade level. The real proportion may be lower, as these tests are taken only for those who attend government-funded schools.
With respect, I'd offer that you may be underestimating how literacy-avoidant the households of illiterate adults were likely to have been. Their parents were almost certainly to have been illiterate as well, or at least very low literacy. They didn't include library visits in the child's culture.
My suggestion has its own challenges, but the basic premise is that doing everything that we can to put books in the laps of these parents and children is the best avenue.
Consider that literacy training doesn't even begin with reading. Just having a book in the household that the parent and child can leaf through, and look at the pictures within, is the start of literacy and story grammar (the floor-level basics of reading). A child inventing a story that they tell themselves or their caregivers, predicated on the pictures that they see in the book, would be a massive literacy win. As well as one for cognitive development.
Ideally, after which the child starts to request books and request being either told an invented story or read to.
Is there any evidence that an intervention like this, without any other change, has any impact?
Consider that inner city schools are often massively over-funded per child to virtually no metrics benefit. My suggestion is to allocate some such (relatively minimal) funding earlier in life, in line with cognitive development, so that children may be more successful in school in spite of later funding. Ideally, reducing the later funding that is needed to help children achieve.
Whether you're aware of it or not, you're asking for research with a very specific set of variables.
Whereas I'm making a suggestion, as a Speech and Language Pathologist, which is in line with child development best practices that are predicated on more general child development research. The latter which has formulated a long standing set of child-development best practices. One of the most primary being that the child must hear as much language as possible, and much of it should come from reading stories to and with the child.
I'm unsure of your first statement as well. Either look for such a study yourself, or if one doesn't exist then one may need to be done including those very specific variables.
What I am sure of is that absence of household books guarantees a negative outcome. And therefore it would be considered to be unethical, in research or more generally, to keep households deprived of books. As doing so would both make success more or less impossible, generally, as well as more specifically deprive children who are cognitively dispositioned to pick up a book on their own despite their parents.
What are you trying to avoid, exactly? The cost?
I simply pointed out that the correlation you pointed out may not be causal, and asked whether the intervention you propose has been shown to be effective.
It sounds like the answer is 'no'.
One of the most primary being that the child must hear as much language as possible, and much of it should come from reading stories to and with the child.
>It sounds like the answer is 'no'.
I answered your question, and the answer was not "no".
You're putting words in my mouth. Nice decorum. Is that your method of creating an illusion of making a point?
Ignoring my general reluctance to play fetch as a matter of debating someone that has no subject matter expertise.
I said that your request asks for overly specific variables that are more than covered by orthodox child development research and practice.
Have you heard children making up songs, stories, and narratives while playing? Can illiterate parents tell stories independent of reading? Can they do it while using the pictures in the child's book?
The fault that invalidates your variable is that children will independently pick up books, regardless of parents. What they tend to do with those books, pre-literacy, are the building blocks of later literacy. Additionally, this process can be helped if the child incidentally happens to see literacy modeled on TV for example.
Your question is roughly parallel to asking a doctor to prove that having nutritious food in a house is healthy for a child, even if the parents themselves choose personal malnourishment.
If there is a chance that the child will reach out and put the better food in their mouth, then it is worth it. Double so if the parent comes to understand that the child enjoys the better food, and so begins looking to feed them with it. This is precisely what happens in child development with books and stories. Reading the words on the page isn't even required for many years. Better?
Yours is a nonsense request that comes from a place of either bottom-barrel debate tactics or a weird level of ignorance that doesn't deserve anyone's time aside from the expert assuring you that you're wrong.
I have a Master of Science in a child development domain as well as a Bachelor of Science in Communication Disorders. I'm assuring you that you are wrong. If you do not believe me, then consult a textbook or google scholar. Assuming that you'd know what you'd need to read across the domain.
>Giving books to illiterate parents is not going to result in stories being read to children.
I prior explained why this is wrong.
The fault that invalidates your variable is that children will independently pick up books, regardless of parents. What they tend to do with those books, pre-literacy, are the building blocks of later literacy. Additionally, this process can be helped if the child incidentally happens to see literacy modeled on TV for example.
If you do not believe me, then consult a textbook or google scholar. Assuming that you'd know what you'd need to read across the domain.
In either case, it would be helpful if you could suggest one or two papers that illustrate your point about book exposure without reading. I can follow the citations in both directions to find others.