CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025

Friday, January 24th 2025, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)

The Impact of Reading Methods on Educational Inequalities:
Insights from the French Case

Jérôme Deauviau & Paul Gioia

Professor of Sociology ENS - Centre Maurice Halbwachs
PhD, Centre Maurice Halbwachs & INED

Please register here to join us

After one year in first grade (“cours préparatoire”), nearly half of the pupils in France are unable to read 50 words per minute, which is the official benchmark. And 22% read less than 25 words per minute, a sign of a very fragile start to reading, with serious consequences for the rest of their school career. Furthermore, reading proficiency at the beginning of second grade (“CE1”) is already characterized by significant social disparities. Among pupils whose parents have no higher education qualifications, nearly 60% fail to reach the 50-words-per-minute benchmark, and 28% read less than 25 words per minute. For students whose parents both hold higher education degrees, these proportions are reduced by half and by two-thirds, respectively.

What explains the French education system's inability to ensure satisfactory reading proficiency for all pupils? The results of a wide range of international research highlight the decisive importance of the first few months of learning. The Formalect survey, conducted during the 2020–2021 school year, aimed to document the reading instruction methods currently employed in France and assess their impact on student performance. Approximately one in five first grade teachers in France participated in an online survey detailing their teaching practices during the early months of the school year. These anonymized responses were then matched with their pupils' anonymized national assessment results.

This data set constitutes a large and representative sample of first grade classrooms, allowing us to address the following three key questions: What reading teaching methods are currently in place at the start of first grade? What are the effects of different teaching methods on student results? How does the effectiveness of different reading instruction methods vary across students from diverse social backgrounds?

To find out more about the authors:  Jérôme Deauviau  -  Paul Gioia