How well do children know letters and their corresponding sounds? In Norway, the gender difference on these tasks when children start school is significant. The girls have a clear head start.
"We see these differences in all categories – for upper case and lower case letters, for the names of the letters and for their corresponding sounds," says Hermundur Sigmundsson, a professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Psychology.
Girls' letter-sound knowledge is clearly better than that of boys,' and girls remain far better readers than boys at age 15. Since reading is key for so many subjects, this has major consequences for many boys.
New results published in the journal Acta Psychology show that this discrepancy is not the case for first graders in Iceland.
Girls and boys equally competent in Iceland
"We find no gender differences in letter-sound knowledge in Iceland when children start first grade," says Sigmundsson.
This competence applies to reading skills in general as well to the letters and sounds.
"We found that over 56 per cent of the children in Iceland had already cracked the reading code by the time they started school. This means that they could read certain words. There were no gender differences here either," says Sigmundsson.
In Norway, only 11 per cent of children can read words when they start first grade, and 70 per cent of them are girls.
So why is that?
Early focus on school
"When Icelandic children start school, the learning focus is on letters and their corresponding sounds," says Sigmundsson.
Sigmundsson has argued for introducing this approach in Norway as well, where letters and sounds come before words. In Norway, many children are instead encouraged to look at the whole word in context.
The assessment of letter knowledge used by the researchers to measure these skills was developed by Norwegian special education teacher Greta Storm Ofteland. The results obtained using this test have been published in five international articles so far.
Tested new method
The test results are also the basis for the new learning method called READ or LESTU, which has attracted international attention for its positive results through the Icelandic project Kveikjum neistann! (Ignite the spark!). The researchers tested the new method with first-graders in the 2021/2022 school year.
"After the first year in Iceland, everyone in our project had cracked the reading code. This is a very good starting point for further reading development, which focuses on reading comprehension, creative writing and pronunciation," says Sigmundsson.
The following year, 98 per cent of pupils had cracked the reading code, indicating that the result was not an isolated one. The professor has spoken about this project during several conferences in the Nordic countries and discussed it in a podcast with researchers from New York University.
Reading skills improve with individualized instruction
A major part of the method involves providing individualized instruction. The key is to acquire a baseline reading at the start of the first school year, and do follow-up measurements in January and May.
"The goal for our project in Iceland is for 80 to 90 per cent of the pupils to be able to read by the end of 2nd grade. That translates to reading text and understanding it," says Sigmundsson. "We managed to hit that target with the children who started in first grade in autumn 2021. In second grade the following year, 83 per cent of these children could read text and understand it. We found no gender gap."
