When reading becomes a Race
Schools have a hunger for standardisation. As a teacher I know. It is easy to sit at a parent meeting or child progress meeting talking about what numbers sit alongside the child’s name.
As a dyslexic person, I am interested in why I just didn’t get it and if I had just been left and not done all those extra classes, would I have got it in my own time. As a teacher I want to know more about what best works for a dyslexic compared to a ‘normal’ student. And as a tutor I want to know why parents worry about paying money for their child to get to the right reading age so they don't fall behind.
Where and When did the reading age start?
Cyril Burt's Mental and Scholastic Tests (1921) and Schonell's Graded Word Reading Test (1945) became influential foundations of reading assessment in Britain. I remember using the Schonell test at the start of each academic year to establish a baseline reading age for my students.
The 1944 Butler Act increased the use of selection and standardised assessment in English education through the introduction of the 11-plus system. Reading-age measures, which became widely used in the decades that followed, fitted naturally into a system increasingly interested in comparing pupils against national expectations. As a result, reading ages became a familiar feature of school reports throughout much of the twentieth century.
The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy and the expansion of SATs in the late 1990s shifted attention towards attainment levels and curriculum-based assessments. Reading ages did not disappear, however. They remained an important tool within SEND assessment, intervention programmes, and educational psychology, where they continue to be used alongside other measures of literacy development.
It is important to note that just like, many educational psychologists don’t all agree on the best time to learn to read, they also don’t all agree on one kind of test. For example
-Salford reading test (used for the GL assessments)
-Neale Analysis of reading ability
-York Assessment
Are all different kinds of assessment that all feature, decoding, phonetics and in some comprehension. But the most important part- if you use one you have to stick to one.
For the Dyslexics
I sometimes question whether or not I would have figured it out in my own time. Rather than going to extra lessons literally pulling my hair out as the session went on.
Research by Sebastian Suggate comparing earlier and later starters suggests that initial advantages from very early reading instruction often diminish over time, with many differences becoming much smaller by adolescence. So the argument to say the earlier the better might not be true. Some suggest that after age 8 intervention becomes urgent, why? Not because the brain has decided it doesn’t want to learn but because of the social and academic costs to the system. It is better for everyone to learn together so we don’t all need one to one teachers to help us.
Future of reading
One should question what is the function of the reading test or any test for that matter. I would argue that they have become a bench mark for schools and districts and for the child.
Tests provide a brilliant platform for assessors and teachers to base their next step of objectives from, but the weight and stresses that the now SATs tests bring to primary schools show that it is never for the student.
With the unknown future of AI reading is critical. To know the difference between the words, happy, content, gleeful and cheery and their subtle differences allows the reader to go deeper into their own thoughts and conversations with others.
To be able to read a text at a speed that allows you to read other texts to then compare contrast and to critically analyse are all skills we should continue to develop.
To be able to read fluently to others and to tell stories is something that is deep within human nature.
Reading was never meant to be a score. Reading is how we borrow the thoughts of people we will never meet, travel to places we will never visit, and test our own ideas against those of others. The danger is not that children fail reading tests. The danger is that they begin to believe the test was the point of reading in the first place.
References
Cyril Burt's Mental and Scholastic Tests
https://archive.org/details/mentalscholastic00burtrich
Schonell's Graded Word Reading Testhttps://readingwise.com/assets/uploads/pdf/SchonellReading.pdf
1944 Butler Act
Sebastian Suggate
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Suggate:_early_reading_may_affect_comprehension
