Children learning to read later do catch up

Finding out whether the later reading achievement of children differs depending on when they learn to read is methodologically difficult. However, a new article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly shows that by age 10, children who had learned to read at seven had caught up with those learning to read at five. Later starters had no long-term disadvantages. The article presents the results of two New Zealand studies, one employing three pairs of longitudinal samples and the other cross-sectional, spanning the first six years of school, for students with a reading instruction age of five versus seven years. Analyses accounted for receptive vocabulary, reported parental income and education, school/community affluence, classroom teaching, home literacy environment, reading self-concept, and age.