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2023 - Edition 12 | February 22

Alphabetization and literacy are essential for social mobility

Poor reading can be a barrier to the training of skills necessary for the productive transition between school and the labor market

Hello, *|NOME|*

     Properly appropriating the ability to read is an essential condition for children to reach the full potential of their lives. Unfortunately, the most recent data on the representative student at public schools present an extremely discouraging scenario regarding the quality of alphabetization and the fluency in reading of Brazilian children.

     The last National Literacy Assessment (ANA) was conducted in 2016 and revealed, for example, that at the end of the 3rd grade of Elementary School only half of the students were able to read and interpret the meaning of a short text. One of the fundamental conditions for reading skills to develop properly during childhood is quality alphabetization, which allows the student to connect, in an increasingly efficient way, the constitutive parts of written language –the letters of the alphabet, syllables and words-- to the natural way in which thought appears to us from an early age: the voice. There is already documented in the specialized literature on the subject, evidence of the impact of successful experiences in the construction of the pillars of good literacy.

    There are some programs that work with families to train them and others that interact directly with children in order to provide valuable stimuli in the formation of initial reading skills, which increase their preparation for the beginning of the formal schooling process, such as Ready4K, implemented in the 2013-2014 and 2015-2016 school years in San Francisco, California (USA). Ready4K focused on 4-year-old preschool children, in early childhood public education centers, and was based on sending SMS text messages to parents or caregivers. These messages stimulated the involvement between parents (caregivers) and children to develop a wide range of skills related to initial alphabetization and literacy, including recognition of upper and lower case letters, recognition of the sound of letters, phonological awareness, consciousness of rhymes in songs, writing of proper names, understanding of stories and vocabulary. At the end of the 8-month implementation, the program was successful in improving children’s language development indicators.

     There are also programs that act directly on language educational curricula at the beginning of the literacy process. Since 2006, Communication, Language and Literacy Development was implemented in all English public schools. The initiative aimed to promote effective pedagogical practices of alphabetization and literacy. The program provided financial support for hiring pedagogical consultants for the country's educational networks in a systematic effort to disseminate literacy practices based on phonic education. The services provided by the pedagogical consultants involved an initial audit (including observations of current literacy practices and detailed diagnostic assessments of children) and the development of an action plan. In addition, consultants gave training to teachers and guided them on how to plan more effective learning opportunities. Positive impacts on reading indicators have been documented in the specialized literature on the program, especially for the poorest students in the population of interest.

   Observing poor countries with a family background reality closer to that of Brazilian children: in Uganda, for example, reformulations in the educational literacy curriculum, implemented and tested as of 2013, presented equally encouraging results on learning indicators (see here).

     Young people in families whose guardians have at least higher education are much more educated than those belonging to homes where the guardian has at most incomplete Elementary or Junior High School schooling. In the first group, most have completed higher education; in the second, completed High School (which is an evolution compared to twenty years ago, but insufficient for the necessary qualification in an economy whose technological matrix evolves rapidly and excludes people and countries that do not keep up with the technological frontier).

    An alternative class of programs focuses on students who have already passed through the beginning of formal schooling and have not obtained the basic skills to become fluent readers. This is the case of the alphabetization and literacy mentoring program for students with learning lags implemented since 2015 in public schools in Manizales, Colombia. The students participated in individualized instruction sessions, provided during regular school hours, for small groups. After a semester in operation, the program succeeded in increasing grades in a standardized reading exam. An interesting point is that no statistically significant effects were found in the score of the part of the examination that measured the ability to understand the text being read, which suggests that it is particularly difficult to raise children who lag to the status of good readers. In this sense, it seems more effective to invest in the formation of good readers at the beginning of the schooling process than to try to recover them.

    Children who read poorly incorporate the contents of the curriculum base only partially and inadequately, and this problem worsens exponentially as learning depends on reading increasingly larger texts with increasingly complex meaning. It is natural, therefore, that poor reading acts as a barrier to the formation of skills that could sustain a more productive transition from school to the labor market, having serious consequences as to the use of opportunities for human development and social mobility. It is urgent for the country to consider in a systemic way the problems of alphabetization and literacy, relying on the best available scientific evidence.

        See you in the next “IMDS Letter”!

        Paulo Tafner

        CEO


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