Teachers-in-training
have long been taught that fourth grade is when students stop learning to read
and start reading to learn. But a new Dartmouth study in the journal Developmental
Science tested the
theory by analyzing brain waves and found that fourth-graders do not experience
a change in automatic word processing, a crucial component of the reading shift
theory. Instead, some types of word processing become automatic before fourth
grade, while others don't switch until after fifth.
The findings
mean that teachers at all levels of elementary school must think of themselves
as reading instructors, said the study's author, Associate Professor of
Education Donna Coch.
"Until now,
we lacked neurological evidence about the supposed fourth-grade shift,"
said Coch, also principal investigator for Dartmouth's Reading Brains Lab.
"The theory developed from behavioral evidence, and as a result of it,
some teachers in fifth and sixth grade have not thought of themselves as
reading instructors. Now we can see from brain waves that students in those
grades are still learning to process words automatically; their neurological
reading system is not yet adult-like."
Automatic word
processing is the brain's ability to determine whether a group of symbols
constitutes a word within milliseconds, without the brain's owner realizing the
process is taking place.
To test how
automatic word processing develops, Coch placed electrode caps on the heads of
third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders, as well as college students. She had her
test subjects view a screen that displayed a mix of real English words (such as
"bed"), pseudo-words (such as "bem"), strings of letters
(such as "mbe"), and strings of meaningless symbols one at a time.
The setup allowed her to see how the subjects' brains reacted to each kind of
stimulus within milliseconds. In other words, she could watch their automatic
word processing.
Next, Coch gave
the participants a written test, in which they were asked to circle the real
words in a list that also contained pseudo-words, strings of letters, and
strings of meaningless symbols. This task was designed to test the
participants' conscious word processing, a much slower procedure.
Interestingly,
most of the 96 participants got a nearly perfect score on the written test,
showing that their conscious brains knew the difference between words and
non-words.
However, the
electrode cap revealed that only the college students processed meaningless
symbols differently than real words. The third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders'
brains reacted to the meaningless symbols the same way they reacted to common
English words.
"This tells
us that, at least through the fifth grade, even children who read well are
letting stimuli into the neural word processing system that more mature readers
do not," Coch said. "Their brains are processing strings of
meaningless symbols as if they were words, perhaps in case they turn out to be
real letters. In contrast, by college, students have learned not to process
strings of meaningless symbols as words, saving their brains precious time and
energy."
The phenomenon
is evidence that young readers do not fully develop automatic word processing
skills until after fifth grade, which contradicts the fourth-grade reading
shift theory.
The brain waves
also showed that the third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders processed real words,
psuedowords, and letter strings similarly to college students, suggesting that
some automatic word processing begins before the fourth grade, and even before
the third grade, also contradicting the reading shift theory.
"There is
value to the theory of the fourth grade shift in that it highlights how reading
skills and abilities develop at different times," Coch said. "But the
neural data suggest that teachers should not expect their fourth-graders, or
even their fifth-graders, to be completely automatic, adult-like readers."
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