Reardon Sean E, Valentino Rachel A, Shores Kenneth A
Stanford University. USA.
Future Child. 2012 Fall;22(2):17-37. doi: 10.1353/foc.2012.0015.
How well do U.S. students read? In this article, Sean Reardon, Rachel Valentino, and Kenneth Shores rely on studies using data from national and international literacy assessments to answer this question. In part, the answer depends on the specific literacy skills assessed. The authors show that almost all U.S. students can "read" by third grade, if reading is defined as proficiency in basic procedural word-reading skills. But reading for comprehension--integrating background knowledge and contextual information to make sense of a text--requires a set of knowledge-based competencies in addition to word-reading skills. By the standards used in various large-scale literacy assessments, only about a third of U.S. students in middle school possess the knowledge-based competencies to "read" in this more comprehensive sense. This low level of literacy proficiency does not appear to be a result of declining performance over time. Literacy skills of nine-year-olds in the United States have increased modestly over the past forty years, while the skills of thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds have remained relatively flat. Literacy skills vary considerably among students, however. For example, the literacy skills of roughly 10 percent of seventeen-year-olds are at the level of the typical nine-year-old. This variation is patterned in part by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. Black and Hispanic students enter high school with average literacy skills three years behind those of white and Asian students; students from low-income families enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind those of high-income students. These are gaps that no amount of remedial instruction in high school is likely to eliminate. And while the racial and ethnic disparities are smaller than they were forty to fifty years ago, socioeconomic disparities in literacy skills are growing. Nor is the low level of literacy skills particularly a U.S. phenomenon. On international comparisons, American students perform modestly above average compared with those in other developed countries (and well above average among a larger set of countries). Moreover, there is no evidence that U.S. students lose ground relative to those in other countries during the middle school years. Thus, although literacy skills in the United States are lower than needed to meet the demands of modern society, the same is true in most other developed countries.
美国学生的阅读能力如何？在本文中，肖恩·里尔登、雷切尔·瓦伦蒂诺和肯尼斯·肖尔斯依据使用来自全国及国际读写能力评估数据的研究来回答这个问题。在一定程度上，答案取决于所评估的具体读写技能。作者表明，如果将阅读定义为具备基本程序性单词阅读技能的熟练程度，那么几乎所有美国学生在三年级时都能“阅读”。但是，为了理解而阅读——整合背景知识和上下文信息以理解文本——除了单词阅读技能外，还需要一系列基于知识的能力。按照各种大规模读写能力评估所采用的标准，在中学阶段，只有大约三分之一的美国学生具备以这种更全面的意义“阅读”所需的基于知识的能力。这种较低的读写能力水平似乎并非随着时间推移成绩下降的结果。在过去四十年里，美国九岁儿童的读写技能有适度提高，而十三岁和十七岁儿童的技能则相对保持平稳。然而，学生之间的读写技能差异很大。例如，大约10%的十七岁学生的读写技能处于典型九岁儿童的水平。这种差异部分受种族、民族和社会经济背景的影响。黑人和西班牙裔学生进入高中时的平均读写技能比白人和亚裔学生落后三年；低收入家庭的学生进入高中时的平均读写技能比高收入家庭的学生落后五年。这些差距是高中阶段再多的补习教学都不太可能消除的。虽然种族和民族差异比四十到五十年前小了，但读写技能方面的社会经济差异却在扩大。读写技能水平低也并非美国独有的现象。在国际比较中，与其他发达国家的学生相比，美国学生的表现略高于平均水平（在更大范围的国家中则远高于平均水平）。此外，没有证据表明美国学生在中学阶段相对于其他国家的学生落后。因此，尽管美国的读写技能低于满足现代社会需求所需的水平，但大多数其他发达国家也是如此。
