Persuasive Essay On Literacy

Persuasive Essay On Literacy 

In modern times people grow as society grows and with that comes improvements in subjects such as in-school literacy grows. Literacy plays a crucial role in our everyday lives and greatly impacts our social and economic growth. “Literacy is defined as the ability to access, evaluate, and integrate information from a wide range of textual sources.” As people grow so does our economy and when our economy grows so do jobs. Jobs are now starting to require higher levels of literacy skills to perform tasks that are relevant today. A problem with this is that it is very difficult to truly access a student’s literacy skills. The reason for this could be because of age, gender, race, and background. In this summary, we will describe the literacy skills of students in the U.S. as well as the reasons it might not be what you expect.

Literacy encompasses two main types of skills, these are word-reading skills and knowledge-based literacy competencies. Word-reading skills are essential for reading any type of written text such as books, newspapers, etc. Knowledge-based competencies are essential for understanding text and its meaning. Knowledge-based competencies include having background knowledge of the text, vocabulary skills, as well as having comprehension skills. Most of the time children learn knowledge-based first even though they don’t master it until much later in life. In the U.S. one of the best sources to access children’s literacy skills is the “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K)”. The ECLS-K accesses the literacy skills of around 25.000 students. The test accesses the skills of students in kindergarten in 1998 and accessed the same students’ skills six more times until the students were in eighth grade. The ECLS-K’s data shows that most children learn most of their word-reading skills in their first two years of school, this could be because word-reading skills are easier to learn than knowledge-based skills. One problem with the ECLS-K is that the test assumes most children learn literacy skills in a certain order whereas a child may learn it in a different order causes a lower score.

There is a second test to access literacy skills, its calls the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The NAEP had two main parts, the Main NAEP and the Long-Term Trend (NAEP-LTT) assessments. The Main NAEP includes both the student’s overall score as well as subscores, while the NAEP-LTT is the more common assessment used to scale nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-old students. Based on the NAEP-LTT scores for fourth graders 67 percent scored above the “basic” level, 34 percent above the “proficient” level, and only 8 percent at the “advanced” level. The scores for eighth-graders were 76 percent scored above “basic” level, 34 percent above “proficient” level, and only 3 percent at the “advanced” level. The twelfth-grade scores were 75 percent scored above “basic” level, 38 percent above “proficient” level, and only 5 percent at the “advanced” level. These results are consistent with ECLS-K data. The most dependable assessments of literacy skills come from the NAEP-LTT. Recent assessments have shown that the results of nine-year-old students have increased while the scores of twelve and seventeen-year-old students have stayed around the same. Recent studies have also shown that in the past forty years people’s knowledge-based skills have changed very little. For instance, roughly 10 percent of seventeen-year-old students have less knowledge-based skills than that of a nine-year-old. Many people make the comparison of the rise of student’s math scores versus literacy. In recent years the math scores of nine-year-old students have risen dramatically more than the scores of thirteen and seventeen-year-old students. There are three possible reasons for this and that is: math instruction has gotten better, the two subjects involve different skills, and that math is generally more “teachable” than literacy. This means that the NAEP shows that some students have more complex skills while others don’t. For instance, many students go into high school without the correct knowledge-based skills because they weren’t taught it in middle school properly.

Now in modern times, we wonder what is the difference in literacy skills between students of different races, ethnicity, gender, and background? Through recent research, we see that there is a major gap between low to high-income students, male to female students, as well as white students to minority students such as black, Hispanic, and Asian students. The white to minority literacy gap has narrowed since the 1970s and is now roughly 0.6 the standard deviation, which is about half of what it was forty years ago. The male to female ratio is different however, female students generally outperform male students by 0.2 of the standard deviation in reading, while male students outperform female students in math also by 0.2 of the standard deviation. The social-economic literacy disparities are much larger than the gaps in racial and ethnic groups. For instance, eighth graders from the lowest-income families have the same literacy skills as an average third-grader from the highest-income families. This gap in literacy skills between low to high-income families is continuing to grow as well. A possible reason for this could be that families spend more on education today than in the 1970s such as childcare and preschool making education become more of an investment meaning that only the highest-income families can afford to spend and provide for the child, unlike the lowest-income families. The ECLS-K is better for determining these disparities in literacy skills unlike the NAEP because the NAEP does not access a child’s literacy skills before nine and does not continue to track the same students. Data from the ECLS-K shows that the disparities in black and white students in kindergarten were 0.5 the standard deviation, in third grade, it was 0.75, and in eighth grade, it was nearly a whole point. This is most likely because of the low long-term family income. A problem for immigrant students was that the ECLS-K did not access students who were not fluent in English so many Hispanic and Asian students were not able to get tested right away but were able to before the third grade. The Hispanic to white literacy gap was large but narrows over time as the Hispanic students get exposed to more English and become more familiar with the language. Due to the major gap in literacy skills between high to low-income families, people believe that the best way to shorten this gap is through early childhood interventions.