Not all young people in Finland can read anymore. According to researchers, the widening gap in literacy skills requires swift political action. Solutions are already being sought in classrooms.

Finland has the world’s best reading skills among 15- to 16-year-old schoolchildren. This was reported by the first PISA study measuring young people’s reading skills at the beginning of the millennium.

A little over a decade later, signs began to emerge that young people’s reading skills were deteriorating. The curve dropped sharply, with reading skills appearing to decline year after year.

In the latest PISA study, Finland has fallen to sixth place. It has been overtaken by Estonia and many Asian countries.

The results were widely shocking.

Almost 14 percent of Finnish young people graduating from comprehensive school have such poor reading skills that they are unable to cope with everyday situations.

The differences in reading skills between girls and boys are the largest among Western OECD countries.

For the first time, family background seems to have created a clear gap between weaker and stronger readers in Finland as well.

The number of top readers has decreased.

The latest PISA study was published in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic. The fear is that reading and writing skills will divide Finnish young people into increasingly distinct castes in the future.

Lauri Ståhlberg worked as a class teacher at a primary school in eastern Helsinki and as a special needs teacher in Kirkkonummi in the 2010s.

During those years, he became interested in assessing literacy skills. He left his teaching job and began developing a digital literacy test called Tutorised. It is now used by around 50,000 children every year.

The PISA study assesses literacy as the ability of young people to find, evaluate, and apply information for everyday life and future needs. Tutorised measures more basic literacy skills, such as reading fluency and text comprehension.

Teachers have their students take the test. This gives them a better understanding of their students’ reading speed, vocabulary, reasoning skills, summarizing skills, and ability to understand text structures.

What is special about Tutorised is that it accurately highlights any reading difficulties. It quickly identifies the weakest readers.

The results allow the teacher to immediately see how an individual student’s reading skills compare to those of, for example, two thousand other students who took the test at the same time.

“The differentiation in development is clearly noticeable,” says Ståhlberg.

In some schools, for example, up to half of the students in the second grade may have poor results. In other schools, none of the second-grade students have poor results.

The proportion of poor readers has increased significantly, and the results are divergent. In 2009, 8.1 percent of school leavers were poor readers, and in 2018, the figure was already 13.5 percent. This is worrying, says Ståhlberg.

He is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. The topic of his dissertation is related to the reading skills of elementary school students.

Boys are particularly at risk. Ståhlberg emphasizes that special efforts should be made to improve their reading skills and motivation to read. More than three out of five boys read “only when they have to,” according to the Pisa study.

Stopping the divergence in reading skills requires swift political action, says Ståhlberg.

He has solutions to offer, “which should come as no surprise to political decision-makers.”

Residential areas should be made attractive to everyone by increasing home ownership and recreational opportunities in areas with a weak socioeconomic background.

It would be good to focus emphasis classes and special education resources mainly on these areas.

Students with an immigrant background should be given opportunities to interact with students who speak Finnish as their native language so that their language skills can develop more quickly.

“However, this is challenging in segregated areas. It may be that the student’s only Finnish-speaking contacts are their teachers.”

Ståhlberg says that the biggest problem in the literacy of students who speak Finnish as a second language, i.e., those studying S2, is their poor starting level in Finnish. Boys with an immigrant background are particularly at risk.

“If a student does not understand Finnish, they cannot understand the text.”

The segregation of young people’s literacy skills is due to broader changes in society. The value placed on literacy and reading has declined. Social media and the entire current digital environment weaken young people’s ability to concentrate, says Ståhlberg.

There are more and more foreign-language speakers in Finland, and the number of S2 students has doubled in a decade.

The fact that the differences in learning outcomes between immigrants and native speakers of the official language are the largest among OECD countries says something about this divergence.

On the other hand, there is no significant difference in the learning outcomes of immigrants in Finland and other OECD countries.

Ståhlberg’s study, published in April, reveals an interesting new finding. Approximately one-fifth of students studying the S2 curriculum read and understood Finnish texts at a level sufficient for studying the S1 curriculum. S1 students study Finnish as their mother tongue.

In practice, about one-fifth of S2 students read Finnish texts more fluently and understood them better than the weakest third of S1 students.

In addition, support aimed at developing reading skills seems to be directed partly at students who do not need it, while not all those who need it receive the support they require. This inappropriate targeting is at least partly due to the fact that in some cases, students are selected for S2 studies based on the language or ethnic background recorded in the population register, Ståhlberg estimates.

“Students should be selected for the S2 curriculum on the basis of their Finnish language skills and transferred to the S1 curriculum when their language skills are at a sufficient level. Students’ language skills should be assessed systematically during their school career using a standardized test.”

Ståhlberg has another idea for stopping the differentiation in reading skills. He proposes level groups for preparatory teaching and S2 small group teaching, in which students could progress based on their Finnish language skills.

When he worked as a preparatory class teacher in the 2010s, he noticed that new students almost without exception slowed down the learning of more advanced Finnish.

“We always had to go back to the beginning to teach the basics.” […]