Evansville, IN – According to the state officials, the results reportedly show that too few Indiana students have mastered foundational reading skills by the end of third grade: nearly one in five students are still struggling to read at this key milestone.
Officials also announced that the results show that more than 65,000 Indiana’s third grade students, or 81.9% demonstrated proficient reading skills on the assessment.
This is a minimal improvement of 0.3 percentage points over results for the 2021-2022 school year.
Indiana’s third grade literacy rates have been dropping for a decade, even prior to the academic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, results remain 9.5 percentage points below the state’s highest-ever proficiency rate (91.4%) during the 2012-2013 school year.
In total, nearly 15,000 third grade students – or 18.1% – will need additional support to meet grade-level reading standards.
For the second year, schools had an opportunity to proactively administer the IREAD-3 assessment to their second grade students at no cost – a tactic that has already proven successful at providing educators and families an early On Track indicator to determine if students will master foundational reading skills by the end of grade three.
