Why Reading Gaps Continue
The continued reading gap among early elementary students has been attributed to a number of different factors, including changes at school and at home.
“We’re seeing higher chronic absenteeism than before the pandemic, and attendance and reading are deeply connected,” says Jodi Dodds Kinner, national vice president of strategic accounts at Panorama Education. “A student who isn't consistently in the building can't get consistent instruction, no matter how good that instruction is.”
In addition, students in some cash-strapped school districts lack access to additional instructional support.
But even before they reach school age, many young students have had more screen time and less one-on-one conversation and parent-child reading time compared with their older peers. Those early experiences foster language development and pre-reading skills. “While educational technology can support literacy, passive screen time often replaces activities like being read to, independent reading and even imaginary play time,” Williams says.
Technology Can Identify Struggling Readers Earlier
Regardless of the reasons for the reading deficits, technology-enabled school districts can use a variety of digital tools to identify struggling readers earlier and provide targeted interventions.
“The districts making real progress are the ones who intervene early rather than waiting until the nine-week grading period or an end-of-year assessment,” Kinner says. “They’re connecting reading data, attendance data and behavior data in one place, so teachers can see the full picture of a student rather than one data point in isolation. That’s the difference between reacting to a problem in April and catching it in October.”
For example, Illinois School District U-46 had fragmented data systems that hindered holistic student support and decision-making. After implementing a system change that made it easier to use data to identify students in need early and match them to the right intervention, the district increased the percentage of students reading at grade level from 8% to 34% in two years, Kinner says.
Identifying the need is only the first step. “The unlock is what happens in the days after you identify a struggling reader,” says Jessica Reid Sliwerski, CEO and co-founder of Ignite Reading. “Too many districts have great diagnostic data and no scalable way to act on it. Ultimately, technology should shrink the time between ‘We noticed this student is behind’ and ‘This student is getting the right help,’ not just produce another dashboard.”
Using Technology To Provide Targeted Interventions
Digital tools shouldn’t replace high-quality teaching, but they can enhance and reinforce that teaching, Williams says. She recommends investing in digital resources that provide explicit, systematic instruction in the foundational components of literacy, including phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension and that follow a logical sequence of skill development.
Technology can genuinely move the needle for struggling readers, Sliwerski says. She’s seen it happen in these areas:
- Real-time progress monitoring. When a teacher can see growth week over week, not just three times a year, they can see what’s working and make adjustments as needed. Ignite Reading’s research with Johns Hopkins University showed first-grade students moving from 6% to 48% grade-level reading proficiency in a single school year with tightly monitored tutoring, and 85% of those students retained their gains through second grade with no further support needed. “That kind of durability only shows up when you’re tracking progress closely enough to adjust in real time,” Sliwerski says.
- Virtual, high-dosage tutoring platforms. These tools let districts deliver true one-on-one interventions, not just small-group support. “One-on-one is what gives you the precision to actually close a specific skill gap,” Sliwerski says. “A tutor can see exactly where a student's decoding breaks down in real time and adjust the very next prompt, which is much harder to do well when you're splitting attention across a group. This matters especially in rural or hard-to-staff schools where in-person, individualized instruction is often the hardest thing to deliver at scale.”
- AI-supported practice tools. These tools give kids more reps of decoding practice with real-time feedback. For example, speech recognition tools can tell if a student is actually decoding correctly, not just guessing from pictures. When used appropriately, “these tools free up human tutors and teachers to spend their time on the highest-leverage moments of instruction rather than repetitive drills,” Sliwerski says.
