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Reading: exploring the reading skill after the second schoolyear in Icelandic children

Paper · 2026 · Hermundur Sigmundsson, Helga Sigrun Thórsdóttir and Svava Hjaltalín

Summary

The study asks two questions about Icelandic children at the end of second grade. First, do boys and girls differ in reading ability? Second, do children taught with the READ approach read better than peers on the regular curriculum? In May 2023 the authors tested 545 children (mean age 7.7) with the LÆS test, which checks both reading accuracy and understanding of a text. The READ group was 47 pupils in Vestmannaeyjar, part of the Ignition project. The comparison group was 498 pupils from 20 other schools. READ teaches letter–sound links early in first grade through structured phonics. It adds deliberate practice and gives each child tasks that match their current skill.

The authors found no reliable gap between boys and girls. The difference between groups, however, was large: 83% of Vestmannaeyjar children could read and understand the text, compared with 52% elsewhere. The authors read this as support for early, systematic decoding instruction. They frame it against Iceland's weak and declining reading scores, while noting that the READ group is small and was not randomly assigned.

Key points

  • The sample was N = 545 (260 girls, 285 boys; mean age 7.7, SD 0.39), assessed in May 2023 with the LÆS test, which covers both accuracy and comprehension.
  • 83% of READ pupils in Vestmannaeyjar reached literacy, against 52% in the control group. Boys and girls in Vestmannaeyjar both scored 83%.
  • In first grade, every Ignition pupil (48/48) cracked the reading code in 2021–22, and 47 of 48 did so in 2022–23. The project targets 80% full literacy by the end of grade 2 and 90% by grade 3.
  • Earlier Norwegian work found that children need roughly 19 (±5) of the 29 letter–sounds before they can decode words.
  • The study draws on the Simple View of Reading, which holds that reading ability comes from multiplying word decoding by language comprehension.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The Simple View of Reading treats reading as decoding multiplied by comprehension, so a reader who is weak in either part fails overall, and the two parts should be diagnosed separately.
  • I2. Decoding only begins once a learner knows enough of the inventory (about 19 of 29 letter–sounds), which suggests a coverage threshold before compositional skill appears.
  • I3. The Training Hour sets each task just above the child's current level, rather than giving everyone the same material.
  • I4. The LÆS outcome counts a child as literate only if the child both reads accurately and understands the text, producing one strict binary pass/fail.
  • I5. The authors admit that their comparison is non-random and call for a randomized trial against a "business-as-usual" control.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (answer): When a reader fails a school-course test, label the cause as either a surface failure (tokens or tree) or a comprehension failure (frames or world), so that fixes go to the right stage.
  • I2 (tokens): Measure what share of morphological patterns and lemmas the tagger handles reliably, and treat falling below a threshold as a warning that later parsing will collapse.
  • I3 (learn): Choose silver examples and LLM-teacher items near the parser's current frontier of competence, such as sentences where witness parsers partly disagree, instead of sampling uniformly.
  • I4 (answer): Score QA on fables and tales as a pass only when the answer is correct and the supporting frame or world facts were extracted correctly, so lucky guesses do not count.
  • I5 (learn): Run ablations of new repair rules or teacher tiers against randomly held-out, unchanged baselines and negative controls, so that gains are not mistaken for selection effects.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Norwegian University of Science and TechnologyTrondheim · Norway8 works · 1,174 citations🎓University of IcelandReykjavik · Iceland5 works · 41 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Social Sciences · 1,954 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 worksEducation · 212 works

Cite

Cite as Hermundur Sigmundsson, Helga Sigrun Thórsdóttir and Svava Hjaltalín. 2026. Reading: exploring the reading skill after the second schoolyear in Icelandic children. Frontiers in Education 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/feduc.2026.1787103

@inproceedings{sigmundsson2026reading,
  title = {{Reading: exploring the reading skill after the second schoolyear in Icelandic children}},
  author = {Hermundur Sigmundsson, Helga Sigrun Thórsdóttir and Svava Hjaltalín},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Education 11},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3389/feduc.2026.1787103},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1787103}
}

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