A study shows that reading and math skills at age seven can predict how much money an adult will make, reports Lindsay Abrams at The Atlantic.

This surprising discovery was even unexpected by one of the lead researchers Stuart Ritchie, reports Rebecca Klein at the Huffington Post:

 “A lot of psychologists — including us before we did the study! — would have guessed that, since general intelligence is so important, specific skills like reading and math wouldn’t have any extra effects on SES beyond it,” Ritchie wrote. “But we found that these effects do exist — so no matter how smart people were … being better at reading and math at age seven was still significantly linked to SES aged 42.”

The study was lead by Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh. They wanted to what degree academic skill played into the overall equation for a successful life.

They looked at different measures of success at various points in the lives of over 17,000 residents of England, Scotland and Wales who were followed for 50 years after their birth. The measures focused on five different points in the participants lives. The first was socioeconomic class at birth, and researchers looked at the parent’s occupation and whether they owned or rented a home and what size it was.

The second measure was reading and math skills at age seven and how interested students seemed to be in learning subjects. The third measure was intelligence at age eleven and participants’ IQ scores. The fourth was academic motivation at age sixteen — specifically, they looked at how strongly participants agreed with statements such as “School is a waste of time”.

Finally the researchers looked at the students’ adult socioeconomic status at age 42. This included occupation, income and homeowner status.

The results showed that how much money people made at midlife was predicted by math skills at age seven, with a grade level boost in reading corresponded with a salary $7,750 higher at age 42.

Early reading ability proved to also be an indicator, but only girls. The good news is that according to Bates:

 “Math and reading are two of the most intervention-friendly of topics: Practice improves nearly all children.”

The study, titled “Enduring Links From Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status,” is available in Psychological Science via SAGE Journals.

The post Can 2nd Grade Math, Reading Skills Predict Adult Salaries? appeared first on Education News.

Although male students continue to outperform their female peers in mathematics, according to the analysis of Programme for International Student Assessment data which included over 1.6 million students from 75 countries around the world, the math gap between genders pales in comparison to the gap in reading where the difference in performance is nearly 3 times as large – except it’s the girls who come out on top.

The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics. There was considerable variation in the extent of the sex differences between nations. There are countries without a sex difference in mathematics performance, and in some countries girls scored higher than boys. Boys scored lower in reading in all nations in all four PISA assessments (2000, 2003, 2006, 2009). Contrary to several previous studies, we found no evidence that the sex differences were related to nations’ gender equality indicators. Further, paradoxically, sex differences in mathematics were consistently and strongly inversely correlated with sex differences in reading: Countries with a smaller sex difference in mathematics had a larger sex difference in reading and vice versa. We demonstrate that this was not merely a between-nation, but also a within-nation effect. This effect is related to relative changes in these sex differences across the performance continuum: We did not find a sex difference in mathematics among the lowest performing students, but this is where the sex difference in reading was largest. In contrast, the sex difference in mathematics was largest among the higher performing students, and this is where the sex difference in reading was smallest.

The authors of the study show that by working to put into place programs to bring gender parity to math and similar subjects, schools and districts are only looking at half the problem. No real progress will be made until similar efforts are directed towards closing the reading gap between male and female students at the same time.

With grades K-12, student performance is often overlooked in favor of research into major selection and career selection when it comes time for students to go to college. Although in the last six decades women have gone into the workforce in record-breaking numbers, there continues to be a number of professions that remain almost stubbornly self-segregated. Specifically, women make up a very small portion of science researchers, especially doing the kind of research typically recognized and awarded by their colleagues.

Only 3% of recent Nobel Prize winners have been women and no women have won similarly prestigious awards like the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize and the Wolf Prize.

The post Data Shows Gender Gap in Reading with Girls Ahead appeared first on Education News.

The National Spelling Bee is adding another rule that is sending its participants into a tizzy, ABC News reports. According to the announcement from Scripps National Spelling Bee, participants will now have to know the meaning of each word in addition to how to spell it in order to be considered for the national finals held in Washington D.C. every year.

The vocabulary knowledge will play a part in the multiple-choice exams that will be administered for the first time this year in order to make it easier for Scripps to narrow the pool down to the final 12.

The changes will make it easier to nail down the nine to 12 competitors who make it to the final round, which will look the same as it has for years to prime-time TV viewers, with spellers taking turns until only the champion has avoided the familiar doomsday bell. The changes do add a wrinkle to the televised semifinals, however, as even the best onstage spellers could find themselves eliminated from the finals if they perform poorly on the multiple-choice test.

The initial reaction from potential competitors has been shock. Vanya Shivashankar, who came in 10th last year and is one of the favorites to win this year, said that based on the replies on her email list many former participants are surprised by the changes and many will now have to adjust the approach they use to prepare for preliminary rounds.

According to Executive Director Paige Kimble, that is the whole point. She said that rote memorization has moved the competition too far from its goals of not only improving spelling but also expanding the students’ vocabulary and broadening their knowledge of the language.

“What we know with the championship-level spellers is that they think of their achievement in terms of spelling and vocabulary being two sides of the same coin,” Kimble said.

Vocabulary has been a regular part of the bee during its 87-year history, but it’s always been the spellers asking for the definition to help them spell the word.

The tests will be administered in private and will not be televised, but they will count for half the final score which will determine who will move on to the semi-finals and the finals. Although many believe that this is a good change in the long run, there are complaints that it was announced too close to the latest competition. With the finals scheduled for May 28th, participants have less than 2 months to radically alter the way they’re preparing.

The post Scripps National Spelling Bee Adds Vocabulary, Definitions appeared first on Education News.

Oregon graduated nearly 6% of its high schoolers last year despite their failure of the state reading exam, The Oregonian reports. The nearly 1,700 students failed the exam and chose to avail themselves to another method of proving competency, according to public education records.

Last year was the first time that the test was required for graduation, and more than 90% of the 32,000 students passed the exam. In total more than 30,000 got a passing grade on the new standardized exams, and the majority of the rest completed reading exercises graded by the students’ schools.

State officials say it’s unclear so far whether the alternative teacher-graded system it set up to document students’ reading ability is as valid and rigorous as the state reading test. Students with limited English proficiency or a disability were most likely to rely on the alternate path. In the metro area, the David Douglas and Portlandschool districts were the biggest users of the locally judged option, relying on it for more than one of every 10 diplomas awarded. More than half of Portland graduates who studied English as a second language at any point in high school used the locally graded exercise to qualify.

Education officials in the affected areas say that they provided intensive tutoring to students who had failed the state exam and the alternative required exercise they designed was written to the same standard as the state test. There is some concern, however, that the latitude allowed to schools in grading the reading exercise could have been used by teachers to pass students who didn’t have the reading skills required for graduation.

The state allowed any student to meet the new requirement by reading two assigned passages and answering open-ended questions to the satisfaction of a teacher using a state-designed grading scale. Teachers were trained to use the scale. But state officials did not check any student’s work to ensure it was strong enough to match a passing score on the state test.

Of the 1,700 students who failed the standardized exam, at least 450 received scores that put them substantially behind their assigned grade level. To get them to the level of their peers would require a massive investment in effort and time.

Among the people who flunked the state reading exam were 35% of ESOL students and 19% of those classified as special education.

The percentage of students who relied on work samples rather than the reading exam to meet the graduation requirement also varied. In Beaverton, for example, only about 4% of graduates had to rely on a locally graded reading sample to pass, while in South Umpqua, nearly a quarter of the graduates had to resort to the alternative method of certifying reading skills.

The post 6% of Oregon Students Graduated Without Passing Reading Exam appeared first on Education News.

In their submission to the Australian House of Representatives, principals from around the country claim that there’s too much emphasis on reading and mathematics in the nation’s elementary schools. The opinion was submitted as part of the feedback being solicited by the lawmakers who are currently considering a comprehensive Australian Education Bill which aims to lift the quality of the country’s education system.

The paper, which was authored by the Australian Primary Principals Association, also had harsh words for the goal set out by the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard to have the country rank in the top five of all nations in reading, mathematics and science scores by 2025. The paper said that such narrow goals will draw focus away from other subjects which are equally critical both to students’ academics and country’s future economic success.

APPA says the OECD group of industrialised nations is already asking what students should learn in the 21st century, and points to a recent blog discussion proposing “a much broader knowledge base; skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration; character-related traits in both moral and performance domains; and a meta-layer of learning”.

While APPA says “reading is the cornerstone of literacy”, it is concerned that to focus national attention on reading as under the 2025 goal outlined by Julia Gillard masks the significant role that listening, speaking and writing play in literacy.

The paper said that the education system should stay the course, and while continuing to focus on the three core subjects, it should still use a curriculum that looks beyond them to create a more enriching experience for the students. Adopting the plan that stresses mathematics, science and reading above everything else would also force teachers to prioritize lessons in the subjects, at the expense of other academic areas because those three subjects are more easily assessed than arts or physical education which are just as important.

Instead of increasing the time spent on the three core subjects, the government should be looking at curriculum that allows students to apply their math, reading and science knowledge in other areas. APPA president Norm Hart is planning to say as much when he appears in front of lawmakers in Brisbane later this week.

“I think the international view on what a good education is about will be different in 2025. What’s important is things like creativity, being able to work collaboratively,” he said.

Mr Hart said it was difficult to answer how to teach creativity, particularly while trying to teach critical thinking at the same time.

“It’s a bit of a paradox to me personally: one is focusing on the particular and the other is as wide open as you make it,” he said. “This is not going to be easy but we need to start on it now.”

The post Australian Principals Worry About Too Much Math and Reading appeared first on Education News.

Vermont has released its fall 2012 standardized test scores, and according to the Burlington Free Press, there are encouraging gains in writing.  Molly Walsh reports that the rise in scores are especially optimistic among the younger groups.

Vermont is one of four states that gives the New England Common Assessment Program test. The test was developed with New Hampshire and Rhode Island in 2005, and Maine later joined its neighboring states. Reading and math proficiency are tested beginning in grade 3, through grade 8, and again in grade 11. Writing and science knowledge are both tested in grades 8 and 11, but for younger grades, science is only tested in 4th grade, and writing only in 5th. The tests are designed to go beyond multiple-choice questions, with some short-answer and extended-response questions. The science test includes some inquiry questions that require experiments or collecting data.

Scores in math and science did not increase over 2011. Vermont’s Secretary of Education expressed disappointment in this less optimistic result:

“High school mathematics continues to be high on the Agency’s and Governor’s list of priorities. While we only saw a slight increase in high school math scores, our educators are serious about improving our students’ understanding and passion for math,” said Secretary of Education Armando Vilaseca in a press release. “If Vermont’s students are going to be ready to continue their education beyond high school and be successful in the 21st century, they’re going to need stronger math skills and knowledge. A two percent increase is not enough.” Vilaseca said.

The high school scores were generally discouraging. Writing proficiency dropped slightly, while math proficiency went from 36% to 38% proficient. Reading did better; 74% of 11th graders were scored as proficient in reading.

Younger students did not present much good news in math and reading. Math proficiency has been around 65%, and that did not change this year. Reading scores are similar to the 11th grade performance, at 73%.

However, 5th grade students did better in writing. The percentage who passed at a proficiency level in 2011 was 46%, and this went up to 51% for 2012. An even greater gain came with the 8th grade tests, where proficiency went up to 66%, from a previous 59%.

State officials said they were pleased with the gains in writing.

Michael Hock, director of educational assessment at the state Education Agency, said writing is the bright spot in this year’s results. “The importance of writing skills cuts across all areas of the curriculum,” Hock said in a statement. “For example, we know that our most successful schools have writing programs that focus on all content areas, even math and science. The impact of these programs is consistently evident in those schools’ test scores.”

Although Vermont’s schools hope to raise achievement in math and science, the state has an enviable graduation rate of over 90%. Its college graduation rates are also very high, and Business Journal ranks it 8th among the 50 states for educational achievement.

The post Vermont Encouraged by Young Students’ Gains in Writing appeared first on Education News.

Erin Fitzgerald hopes that her website provides exactly the kind of help harried parents of preschoolers are looking for. At a time when job and housekeeping responsibilities might not leave enough time for parents to teach their children to read and count, ReadAcrossRiverside.com shows parents how they can get their children on the road to literacy by playing games with them anywhere, including in the car, at the dinner table and even on a grocery shopping trip.

The key, according to Fitzgerald, is interaction. While sitting down and focusing on ABCs is good too, the biggest leg up that parents can give their kids is to converse with them, even if the conversation is about topics other than reading. Telling stories from and about their favorite books when they were children, as well as their favorite games and other activities, engages children and keeps them interested.

However, carving out even a little bit of time to read to them also helps tremendously. It doesn’t have to be long chunks of time. As a matter of fact, long reading sessions might be too much of a challenge for children’s under-developed attention spans. Instead, a few pages from a story before bed every night, or even a picture book before bed time would be ideal.

Fitzgerald said she created the website as a final project for her master’s degree in education with a concentration in reading at Cal State Fullerton. She said she got to practice everything she was learning in her own classroom.

Then, students had a choice of a final project, writing a thesis or a final test. She chose the project.

Fitzgerald said she wanted to create something that the parents of her students at St. Thomas the Apostle School in Riverside could use. The reading and education manuals she saw other students create were expensive to print, Fitzgerald said. So she built a website.

In addition to tips parents can use to get their children started with reading, the website also provides reading lists for pre-schoolers and beyond, in both English and Spanish. Although the site is aimed mainly at kindergarteners and first-graders, parents of students of any age who are struggling with literacy will be able to find something useful – like hints on how to select age-appropriate reading materials and which games work best to improve language acquisition.

The site suggests games to help children practice letter sounds, such as “I spy something that rhymes with blue (shoe).” or “I spy” something with the sounds of a beginning letter, middle letter or the ending sound of a word, such as “ing” or “s.”

The post Website Offers Parents Tips on How to Develop Literacy appeared first on Education News.

Children lagging in reading skills is becoming a chronic problem in Australian schools, yet at least one small town in New South Wales has found a way to tackle it successfully. Raymond Terrace – little more than a village, and a struggling one at that – seems like an odd setting for an education revolution. But there, staff and faculty have found a way to turn around a trend with which the rest of Australia seems to be unable or unwilling to cope.

The solution seems to be in going back to the basics. Students who were found to be especially struggling were enrolled in an intensive phonics program which taught them how to connect letters with sounds and sounds with words. It is considered a backbone for the acquisition of reading skills, and children who do not master phonics by a certain age might be behind their peers in literacy for the rest of their academic careers.

Raymond Terrace Public School principal John Picton says the program, which is in its third year, has been a “godsend” with very positive results. The key thing, he says, is “the obvious focus on phonics and phonic awareness. You go back to basics and build that platform”.

Success in Raymond Terrace could serve as a guiding light to the rest of Australia, which this year found itself near the bottom in literacy and reading when compared to other developed nations. Even among those who have been sounding the alarms about the state of the country’s education system for years, the poor showing was greeted with surprise — and even with shock.

In 2011, Australia took part in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study for the first time, and the results – which were published earlier this week – were discouraging. The literacy skills among fourth-graders were found to be the worst of every single other English-speaking country. They were also behind countries like Bulgaria and Portugal.

“We should be hanging our heads in shame. It’s absolutely damning,” says literacy researcher Kevin Wheldall, an emeritus professor at Macquarie University who developed the phonics-based teaching system being used at Raymond Terrace Public School. Wheldall’s system, called MiniLit (Meeting Initial Needs in Literacy) was shown, in a study published last month about the program at the Raymond Terrace school, to be very effective in addressing literacy problems.

Despite the success that has been achieved deploying MiniLit in places like Raymond Terrace, it’s been slow to find adherents in other provinces, cities and schools. Instead, educators seem to continue their attachment to the Reading Recovery program – which is used in most of the country – despite the fact that recent research proves is it not very effective in helping children catch up their reading skills to grade level.

“I’m not saying it’s not effective but it’s not effective enough and certainly not cost effective,” he says. Wheldall says it works for only one in three children – one child improves, one doesn’t and one would have improved anyway.

The post Australian Children Struggle With Reading, English Skills appeared first on Education News.

According to New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, assertions by liberal lawmakers that a social safety net provided by the government is a bridge to give the destitute an opportunity to cross into a life of self-sufficiency — something far from stifling ambition — might not be accurate, and that a significant portion of recipients do treat such assistance as a permanent crutch. For example, in order to continue receiving subsidies for raising special needs kids, some families in the Appalachian Hill country pull their children out of literacy classes, fearing that they might take to learning a little too well, which could reduce public benefits for the family.

The poverty level in and around Breathitt County, Kentucky is extremely high, making the nearly $700 a month until the child turns 18 all that stands between some families and total financial oblivion. Thus, by handing out these generous checks, the government sets up a system of perverse disincentives that drive families not to improve their lot, but to create yet another generation doomed to live in crippling poverty.

According to a study conducted in 2009, nearly two-thirds of children who qualified for the subsidy in their youth transition directly into the SSI program for adults once they turn 18. They will never hold jobs or get an education, and will continue to live on handouts for the rest of their lives.

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire. Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.

Yet there are some organizations working to break this cycle, among them the nationally recognized Save the Children. Kristof notes that judging from late-night infomercials, many believe that Save the Children focuses its efforts on communities far away in Africa and Southeast Asia, but it maintains a strong presence in high-poverty areas of the United States as well.

Save the Children trains community members to make home visits to at-risk moms like Ms. Hurley, and help nurture the skills they need in the world’s toughest job: parenting. These visits begin in pregnancy and continue until the child is 3 years old.

As the name of their organization suggests, Save the Children focuses its efforts mostly on young people. The wisdom of this tactic has been borne out by substantial body of research showing that early intervention, especially in the areas of education, can turn around a child whose destiny seemed to have been to continue living in poverty well into adulthood.

The post Kristof: Government Safety Net Perpetuates Poverty, Illiteracy appeared first on Education News.

Although parents now have more options when it comes to apps that claim to help teach children how to read, the research on their effectiveness is lagging far behind. According to a report published by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, most of the apps reviewed don’t deliver on their extravagant claims, with most focusing on basic skills and ignoring more complex knowledge that is required for children to achieve competency in reading.

Yet several groups are pioneering a different kind of approach to literacy that embraces technology by offering options to teachers and parents to make them more effective in assisting children who are just learning to read. A paper by the New America Foundation and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop calls for more people to embrace this kind of an approach, which is based less on marketing copy and more on insights offered by education and early childhood development experts.

“Parents are a child’s first and most important teachers, and technology will never change that,” says Ralph Smith, the managing director of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. “But technology can help us connect with parents of young children, and it can help families promote early literacy skills. Many parents, though, need guidance in choosing the right technology and knowing how to use it.”

Most widely available apps offer instruction only in letters, sounds and phonics, which is insufficient to gain mastery in literacy. Only 5% of apps offered on Apple’s iTunes App Store also focused on vocabulary, a key element of reading comprehension. A recent report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that there was a definite link between vocabulary and reading comprehension skills, and data shows that vocabulary gaps between students from low-income families and those from middle-class or high-income homes exist.

In addition to looking at what is missing from the most popular learn-to-read apps, the report also offers a number of recommendations to parents, educators and policymakers who are looking for solutions for their children that will make a real difference in helping them become expert readers.

The report offers several strategies for policymakers and community leaders who can help parents and teachers “homestead” this digital Wild West, including conducting community audits to determine whether and which families have access to technology and media and how they use it; providing teachers with training on technology as a learning tool; creating physical places where parents and educators can come together to experiment with various media platforms to foster literacy; and emphasizing digital media’s potential for learning and conversation between parents and children, not just for games that children play alone.

The post Group Calls Reading App Market ‘Wild Wild West’ appeared first on Education News.