Matthew Effects in Reading
In sociology, the Matthew effect is the phenomenon where “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The term was first coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 and takes its name from a verse in the biblical Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew effect can be found in anywhere in the society, and the paper focuses on Matthew effects among teenage or younger children in terms of their reading skills. Researchers have noted repeatedly that some children come to school somewhat “wealthier” than their peers when it comes to early reading skills. As time goes by, those students who start out with some literacy advantages tend to thrive and grow academically, while their less fortunate peers tend to get left behind. Like the line in Matthew’s Gospel, the rich students get richer, and the poor students get poorer. The reading skill is similar to the “popularity” we discussed in class, and if a child’s reading skill has passed a certain threshold, he/she will be more likely to learn faster then his/her peers, and therefore gets more advanced after some practicing.
In the paper, Matthew effect in reading is formally defined as “without intervention, some students rapidly develop and build upon strong literacy foundations, and other students languish behind their more fortunate peers.” In order to prove the theory is actually true in practice, many experiments has been inducted.
Here is a graph representing students’ reading skills in different school years. We can see that before 1st grade, there is s small gap between, but it’s not significant at all. As times passes, the students with foundational skills gain a significant improvement on reading, but the students with no foundational skills basically remains at their initial states with virtually no improvement. As we can clearly tell, “rich” students get “richer” in terms of reading skills.
This paper is closely related to the topic about our “rich gets richer” topic, and at the same time, it introduces other concepts, other than popularity, that can be analyzed by rich get richer phenomenon. It also mentions some methods of preventing early-age reading difficulties. Those can be view as equivalent to “marketing strategies” we discussed in class; they are able to push children through a threshold of reading, so that they will not suffer from gaining no improvements on reading skills in the future.
source : http://www.balancedreading.com/matthew.html