There is widespread concern about declining literacy skills in recent young Japanese. The present study investigated how higher-level reading and writing proficiencies are underpinned by basic literacy skills in Japanese adolescents. From a large database of the most popular literacy exams in Japan, we retrospectively analyzed word- and text-level…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted school, work, and daily life on a global scale. In the wake of this unprecedented health crisis, schools across the United States were forced to abruptly adapt their educational delivery models. Understanding how student learning trajectories shifted throughout the ongoing pandemic is critical for equipping…

The Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) has invested in a multifaceted effort to improve and sustain literacy outcomes for all students to address the declining literacy rates in Vermont. This project summary describes how the Region 1 Comprehensive Center partnered with the AOE to develop an early literacy playbook to operationalize the Blueprint…

The rapid decline in Australian students' performance on the "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN) writing test is an issue of national concern. This paper presents the first investigation into patterns of achievement and progress on the NAPLAN writing test across the tested year levels (3, 5, 7 and 9) between…

Reading Recovery is a first-grade literacy intervention program with notable short-term benefits, but there are sustainability studies that highlight inconclusive evidence of its enduring success. It was unclear if formerly enrolled Reading Recovery students continue to have long-term literacy skill retention after exiting the literacy…

The PISA 2009 results for Ireland indicated a large decline in reading literacy scores since PISA 2000 (the largest of 38 countries). The decline in mathematics scores since PISA 2003 was the second largest of 39 countries. In contrast, there was no change in science achievement since PISA 2006. These results prompted detailed investigations into…

The aim is to describe the development of achievement in compulsory school in the Nordic countries from the 1960s. The study relies on published results concerning literacy and numeracy from the international large-scale assessments between 1964 and 2012. Among others, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) for most countries, a small but…

Considers what literacy teachers can do to prevent subsequent school failure and lowered test scores with media attention on school violence and trauma in and out of schools. Suggests bibliotherapy, a familiar tool used in earlier decades by teachers to counsel students with problems, is useful today in dealing with students who suffer from…

A report from the National Endowment for the Arts, among much other such research, reveals that literacy is in serious decline in America. Ramifications of this decline extend beyond English and language departments to affect all other disciplines, ultimately raising the question of how a democracy can function when its citizens abandon the…

The author endorses the approach to teaching phonics set out in recent documents (e.g. Progression in Phonics) that extend and supersede the approach set out earlier in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) Framework for Teaching. Proposed are minor, evidence-driven amendments to this approach. The assumption that failure to achieve continuing…

This presentation is devoted to four main topics: (1) the comparative performance of U.S. adults and high school students on international literacy assessments; (2) the literacy/numeracy proficiencies of the nation's adults in different educational groups and among those who recently participated in federally-funded adult education programs; (3)…

Focusing on the problems of validity and representativeness of samples, a study examined the history of literacy in the United States since 1880 in order to set the contemporary debate on test scores, literacy and reading performance in the longer-range perspective of the last 100 years. The quality of the data and the arguments of literacy…

Surveys of literacy attainment have been going on in the United Kingdom since 1948. The main finding is that literacy standards have changed very little in that time. Among 8-year-olds (children in Year 3) in England and Wales, however, standards fell slightly in the late 1980s, and then recovered in the early 1990s. The few international…