American students are struggling with reading — test scores are at new lows, and many students don’t even read whole books.
But while average scores have declined for everyone, boys are doing much worse. On standardized tests, they score lower than girls in reading in nearly every school district in the United States, and at every grade level that tests are given, according to a new analysis from researchers at the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. The reading gap exists around the world too.
Boys’ struggles with reading aren’t new: They have scored lower than girls since standardized tests began a half-century ago (the gaps were largest for students in the 1990s). But in contrast with efforts to encourage girls in math and science, which have helped shrink their achievement gap with boys, little attention or effort has been focused on improving boys’ reading skills.
And since around the mid-2010s, reading scores have been slipping even further — which education experts say is probably contributing to boys’ relative decline in school and college attendance. That’s because reading is a key to learning other academic subjects, and to succeeding in college and careers: A study of 18 countries found that boys’ lagging reading skills had a direct effect on their chances of going to college.
But despite the universality of the gender gap in reading, boys’ reading deficits aren’t necessarily a given, and their skills could be improved, experts say. There’s already proof that achievement gaps are malleable — because they’ve shrunk for girls in math.
“The fact that the math gap has changed so much shows that societal conditions can change these things,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who led the test score analysis. “So we could help boys catch up in reading. We just haven’t organized society and schools yet to do that.”
A persistent gender gap
Test score data presents averages. Many girls struggle to read, and many boys excel at it. But overall, boys are about three-quarters of a year behind girls in reading in fourth grade, and roughly a year behind in 12th grade.
The new analysis from Stanford analyzes how girls and boys performed on state tests and on the NAEP test, known as the nation’s report card and given annually to students in Grades 4, 8 and 12. The test asks students to recall information from texts, think critically about them and make inferences.
Though the size of the gender gap in reading scores has varied over time and geography, it has remained stubborn.
“My lowest readers and most struggling students tended to be boys even 20 years ago, but I think it’s getting worse, and I truly think it has to do with attention and focus,” said Emily LeVasseur, an elementary school reading specialist and dyslexia therapist in Houston.
She attributes the change to screen time, and its effect on the attention spans of children, especially boys, who she worries can give up on school when reading is too hard.
“Reading is at the root of everything academically,” she said. “And the sad part is, when kids don’t get the right intervention and don’t get fluent enough to keep pace with their peers, school becomes so hard, and they internalize that defeat.”
Why the gap exists
On average, girls develop language skills a little earlier as babies, and are more advanced in literacy even before they start school, which has led scientists to posit that there may be biological differences behind the gender gap.
One theory is that prenatal sex hormones cause a part of the brain associated with language to be larger in females. Also, more boys have dyslexia and A.D.H.D., which can make it harder to read.
But any biological differences are small — and are amplified by socialization, researchers said.
“A lot of things have a biological basis but are totally malleable,” said Dalton Conley, a sociologist at Princeton whose research has shown how a child’s genes and environment interact to affect reading outcomes. “It doesn’t mean we couldn’t, if we wanted to as a society, devote so many resources to improving boys’ reading and teaching it to them in a different way that we couldn’t close the gap.”
A range of research has shown how children’s environments influence their reading skills. The stereotypes held by parents, teachers and classmates all affect boys’ reading performance.
Mothers talk more to their baby daughters than to their sons.
Even when boys scored the same as girls in reading, teachers ranked the girls higher.
A review of nearly 100 studies found that by age 8, students believed that girls were better at verbal skills, and that this affected boys’ confidence and interest in reading later on.
Perhaps because of these influences, girls are more likely to say they like to read — so they do it more and get better at it.
Also highly correlated are the kinds of classroom behaviors that lead to learning — things like attentiveness, working independently and sitting still. These are skills that girls tend to develop earlier than boys — and as schools have begun expecting children to learn to read earlier, boys could be at a disadvantage.
What could help
Girls’ reading scores, while still higher than boys’, have been declining too, and there are also large gaps in reading achievement by race and family income. Researchers suggested some strategies that could help boys — and any struggling readers.
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Intervene early. Slow-to-start readers have trouble catching up later, research shows, and boys are overrepresented in this group. These readers should be identified and given extra support as early as kindergarten.
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Teach in small groups. University of Michigan researchers recently studied an intensive tutoring program for reading in North Carolina: groups of four students or fewer gathering three times a week. The surprising result was that all of the progress came from the boys. It could be that boys do better learning in small groups, especially those who struggle with attention, said Nakia Towns, president of Accelerate, a group that is studying ways to close achievement gaps and that financed the study.
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Teach reading well. Teaching phonics using evidence-based programs is crucial, researchers said. So is assigning whole books, incorporating literacy in other subjects like science and social studies, and teaching handwriting and spelling, which are less of a focus in schools now.
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Make it enjoyable. Let children choose their books, and discuss them with their peers.
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Model reading. Boys should see the men in their lives teaching English, reading for pleasure, joining book clubs and taking them to bookstores, said Shilo Brooks, chief executive of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, whose podcast, “Old School,” is about how books can shape men.
Improving boys’ reading skills could help with their education and careers, Mr. Brooks said, while also addressing some of the broader issues young men are facing — questions about their sense of purpose, and what it means to be a man.
“The same way a boy becomes interested in football because he sees his father watch it every Sunday afternoon, he can become interested in reading because he sees his father read for an hour every Saturday morning,” he said. “Books of authentic literary and philosophical merit can widen a boy’s conception of what a man can do, become, suffer from, overcome, and wonder about.”
Graphics by Francesca Paris.
Claire Cain Miller is a Times reporter covering gender, families and education.
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