Centering equity and asset-based reading intervention for adolescents

For years, assessment scores have revealed that significant percentages of students in the United States struggle to read effectively. Pandemic recovery efforts have zoomed in on this challenge, centralizing the urgent need to respond. While most efforts to address below-basic reading occur in primary years, critical numbers of adolescents struggle with foundational reading skills, and fewer curricular efforts engage and support this audience. Instructional leaders have adopted methods centered on a science of reading conceptualized by Scarborough’s Reading Rope, but this offers little guidance for adolescent reading development, typically promoting systematic phonics instruction as the focal lever while minimizing critical comprehension and offering few opportunities to center cultural, linguistic, and place-based assets adolescents bring to reading. This concept paper illustrates how combining the reading rope with Aukerman and Schuldt’s framework for robust asset-based instruction can enhance our knowledge of what works for adolescents and shift intervention away from current ineffective practices and toward a unified approach that builds critical comprehension and enhances engagement while developing foundational skills. We draw on experimental studies of the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention to illustrate how culturally responsive, asset-based approaches can combine with foundational skills instruction to produce significant reading growth for adolescents.