Students look through books during reading time in the library.
/ Jill Schramm, AP Findings from a new federal study suggest
that U.S. schoolchildren may not improve their reading skills
until they have a better grasp of basic vocabulary. The study,
out Thursday from the U.S. Department of Education's National
Center for Education Statistics, looks at the vocabulary skills
of students nationwide and finds that they closely track
students' reading comprehension levels. For fourth-graders, for
instance, the top 25% of readers turned in an average 255-point
vocabulary score on a 500-point scale; meanwhile, the weakest
25% of readers scored only 177 points. The findings represent
the first time that the federal government has analyzed
vocabulary in isolation, and the results show that students have
a long way to go: The average fourth-grader scored 218 points in
2011, essentially unchanged from 2009. The average eighth-grader
scored 265, also unchanged from 2009. Twelfth-graders' results
for 2009 averaged 296 poi