Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research "Reading evens out" research?

Sorry, I wasn't trying at all to use the term as accurately as I can. I was simply trying to say that the usual arguments that teachers give to advanced students (the playing field will level by 3rd grade) is because of the lack of differentiation, and should not be the reason for a lack of differentiation. Please ignore my previous comment (and this one as well).

There is a sense in which aspects of reading level out for the majority of the population. That is, decoding and fluency skills essentially plateau at the late middle school/early high school level because they are easy enough cognitive tasks for the majority of the population to grasp (including some cognitively quite low-functioning individuals). (And one of the reasons derived grade equivalents are a problem on NRT.) Vocabulary and comprehension can continue to build beyond that level, of course.

I completely, totally agree with this. Reading strengthens a lot of academic skills needed in later elementary years/middle school/high school etc. I have seen kids who are just disruptive (doing anything but reading) during quiet reading time, and other kids who are so into their books that they don't even notice the disruptive kids. It annoys me when some teachers say reading evens out -- I think they just focus on the reading mechanics (reading, comprehension, answer x number of questions about the book) and don't encourage reading, because it is fun, informative, and is a wonderful world with imaginative stories.

That's cool, I was thinking there was some underlying semantical thing that confuses the issue. But I get the Harrison Bergeron aspect of what you're saying now.

This is my feeling about it as well. Fluency like arithmetic has a fixed level which we expect almost everyone to reach. So yes after a certain point the age at which reading starts loses significance. If however, early reading is just a sign of intelligence then obviously by the point that occurs the child will have moved onto other more significant achievements that will be noticeable.

Of all the readings in the 2nd post, I found the ERIC article most useful. The IQ levels in Table 1 are interesting -- basically if you know nothing else about a kid other than they are reading before K, you should revise your estimate of their IQ from 100 to 130. I.e., there is big news in the fact that a kid is reading early.

One of the other things I took from it is that *conditional on IQ*, reading levels mean revert, but that this isn't true unconditionally. In other words, if you take 2 kids with 130 IQs, where one is reading at K and one is not, there will be some convergence in their reading ability. But if you compare an early reader with a 130 IQ with a typical non-early reader with an IQ of 100, the former kid will still be well ahead of the latter in a few years. This all seems very intuitive.

It is possible that this research result got garbled by the K-12 community.

If you measure height with a yardstick, then height plataeus and evens out because almost everyone reaches 3 feet eventually. The same is true if the school builds the ceiling 3 feet above the floor.

I've always been of the opinion that it means nothing negative about a child's IQ if he/she is NOT reading early, but it probably means something positive is he/she IS. There did seem to be a bit in that article about kids w/o high IQs who were preocious readers, but not a lot (I skimmed). I have not met a child who was a self-taught, fluent reader before K who was NOT gifted, although I am told they are out there.

(When I say fluent, I mean fluent. Not Biscuit or Frog and Toad.)

What a great discussion. My DS, now a sophomore, was asking how he learned to read. Apparently, one of his current HS teachers knew him when he was in pre-K and remembered how DS used to carry a book with him everywhere.

The teacher asked my son who taught him to read so young, to which DS replied, "Nobody -- I just started reading." That's how we always explained it to him. "And then one day you were reading -- straight up reading."

Skimming some of those articles above seems to validate my suspicion that while our reading to him regularly certainly helped, he is the one who put it all together.

One of my absolute favorite video clips is where he's reading the instruction booklet from CandyLand. He was barely three at the time and read straight through without a hiccup -- and without having ever seen or heard it before. Something like, "CandyLand is a game for small children, many of whom are too young to read." He reacted right away to the irony. (And he was also tickled to death by the "whom" for some reason.)

The school staff that go on & on with the "they all level out" nonsense drive me up the wall. If the OP is still here, DON'T let them get away with that!

Dandy