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April 2011 | Volume 68 | Number 7
The Transition Years Pages 88-89
Research Says / Don't Wait Until 4th Grade to Address the Slump
Bryan Goodwin
It is, perhaps, education's Bermuda Triangle. For decades, educators have wrung their hands over a puzzling
phenomenon that often occurs at around age 9 or 10: Students who were previously doing well in school see their
performance dip, sometimes permanently. Research offers some insights into the possible causes and solutions for
what Jeanne Chall and her colleagues dubbed "the 4th grade slump."
Early Reading Difficulties
Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) noted that 4th grade is a critical transition period, when students move from
"learning to read" to "reading to learn." The slump, they suggested, might be related to students struggling to shift from
reading relatively easy, familiar words and passages to using their reading skills to acquire new knowledge from
increasingly difficult words and texts. For some students, encountering these more difficult texts may unearth a
previously undetected lack of fluency and automaticity.
Willingham (2009) explains that if a student is still sounding out words, he or she will need to devote a great deal of
working memory to that task. As a result, the student will have less brain power left to comprehend what he or she is
reading. "The difficulty is that there's only so much room in working memory, and if we try to put too much stuff in there,
we lose the thread of the story we were trying to follow" (p. 86).
Variations in Vocabulary Knowledge
A second cause appears to be vocabulary development (or lack thereof). In grades 2 and 3, Chall and colleagues
(1990) found that low-income students' vocabularies were on par with the rest of the student population. However, at
this level, tested words tend to be fairly basic and familiar, masking the reality that low-income students often only
know about half as many words as higher-income students (Graves & Slater, 1987).
Researcher Keith Stanovich (1986) has concluded that strong or weak vocabularies can create virtuous or vicious
cycles for readers. Students with strong vocabularies find reading easier and more enjoyable; thus, they read more
and develop ever larger vocabularies. Students with weak vocabularies, on the other hand, find less enjoyment in
reading, read less, and fail to develop the vocabularies they need to become strong readers and learners.
Prior Knowledge
E. D. Hirsch (2003) has argued that another key culprit in the 4th grade slump may be students' lack of domain-
specific knowledge. To illustrate, Hirsch notes that a well-educated Englishman who knows nothing about baseball
would likely be baffled by the simple sentence, "Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run." He would understand the
words, but not their meaning (p. 17).
To that point, a study by Recht and Leslie (1988) asked a group of junior high school students (in which one-half were
identified as good readers and the other one-half as poor readers) to read a passage about a baseball game. The
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researchers found that poor readers with high knowledge of baseball fared much better answering questions about
the passage than good readers with low knowledge of baseball. In other words, all readers may struggle to read
unfamiliar content.
The Rise of Peer Influence
One final piece to understanding the 4th grade slump may come from looking at what goes on not inside classrooms,
but rather inside the minds of 9-year-olds.
In 1967, Torrance surveyed research from around the world and found that child psychologists dating back to the 19th
century had observed a "severe discontinuity" in children's development at about ages 9 and 10 (p. 292). Torrance
found one possible reason for this difficult transition in a body of psychology experiments called conformity studies.
These studies found that sometime in preadolescence, children become strongly influenced by their peers, even
willing to perform poorly just to fit in.
To test these findings, Torrance gave students in different grades a difficult word problem and a full day to solve it,
allowing them to consult peers, teachers, or parents. He consistently found that 3rd grade students were more likely to
ask adults (3050 percent) than their peers (fewer than 20 percent) for help on the problem. In 4th grade, students
showed almost the exact opposite tendency: Fewer than 20 percent of students consulted adults, and nearly one-half
consulted peers.
What Schools Can Do
Researchers have identified a number of solutions for addressing the slump, starting with providing good reading
instruction in the early grades. Direct vocabulary instruction is important to ensure that students know key terms they
encounter in reading passages. However, such instruction alone is not sufficient. By one estimate, explicit vocabulary
instruction can teach, at best, about 400 words a year (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002), a far cry from the 5,000 or so
words students need to add to their vocabularies each year to build the 80,000-word vocabularies they need to be
successful in college. On the other hand, estimates based on the research of William Nagy indicate that if students
read widely one hour per day, five days per week, they'd likely learn at least 2,250 words per yearpossibly much
more (Stone & Urquhart, 2008). Bottom line: direct vocabulary instruction is necessary, but not sufficient to acquire the
word knowledge students need to become strong readers.
Schools should also consider the importance of building students' subject-area knowledge. Stockard's 2010 study of
reading programs in Baltimore appears to support Hirsch's (2003) assertion that "an ideal language program is a
knowledge program" (p. 22). Among other programs, Stockard examined Direct Instruction, a curriculum designed to
provide students with the background knowledge they need to comprehend more difficult content in later grades.
Students who received Direct Instruction, despite starting with lower reading achievement in 1st grade, had
significantly higher reading achievement scores in 5th grade than did students in control schools.
Finally, educators can address increasing peer influence by shaping a positive school culture in which students
experience peer pressure to do well at schoollike the "work hard, be nice," culture at the heart of Knowledge Is
Power Program (KIPP) schools.
A Schoolwide Approach
Teachers often observe that academic problems surface in the upper grades as a result of faulty approaches in the
early grades. That may well be the case with the 4th grade slump. Addressing this phenomenon likely requires a
schoolwide approach: boosting vocabulary and background knowledge gaps for younger students while developing a
positive peer culture, in which learning comes first, throughout the school.
References
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York:
Guilford Press.
Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Graves, M. F., & Slater, W. H. (1987). The development of reading vocabularies in rural disadvantaged students, inner-
city disadvantaged students, and middle-class suburban students. Paper presented at the meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
Hirsch, E. D. (2003). Reading comprehension requires knowledgeof words and the world. American Educator,
27(1), 1013, 1622, 2829, 48.
Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 80(1) 1620.
Stanovich, K. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of
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literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360407.
Stockard, J. (2010). Promoting reading achievement and countering the "fourth-grade slump": The impact of Direct
Instruction on reading achievement in fifth grade. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 15(3) 218240.
Stone, B., & Urquhart, V. (2008). Remove limits to learning with systematic vocabulary instruction. Denver, CO: McREL.
Torrance, P. (1967). Understanding the fourth grade slump in creative thinking. Washington, DC: U.S. Office of
Education.
Willingham, D. (2009). Why students don't like school: A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind
words and what it means for the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Bryan Goodwin is vice president of communications, McREL, Denver, Colorado; bgoodwin@mcrel.org.
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