Why do Many Students Struggle to Read?

Research shows that inefficient reading and underdeveloped visual skills affect more students than most educators realize. Learn how to identify and address them—within your existing literacy program.

Teachers know the reality. Many of their students struggle to read well — and often don’t enjoy reading or call it “boring.”

Science of Reading instruction has brought dramatic change to many districts—enhanced phonics, comprehension strategies, vocabulary work. That cognitive foundation is essential. But it is not complete and does not answer the question, why do many students struggle to read?.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation’s report card, has tracked reading achievement for decades. Across all that time, U.S. reading proficiency barely improved, and in 2024 it fell to its lowest level since NAEP began the grade-12 reading assessment in 1992. The 2024 results found that nearly two-thirds of U.S. 12th graders (65%) are not proficient readers.

What’s Missing?

In its focus on important cognitive skills, the science of reading does not address a crucial factor: reading is not only cognitive — it is physical. Our eyes are the physical gateway through which we see and take in letters, words and symbols that our brains process into meaning with our cognitive skills and prior knowledge.

Our eyes must move, align, and focus accurately to deliver information to the brain. Without these visual skills, reading is harder than it should be.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Your students with visual skills hurdles don’t know that everyone doesn’t “see” the same way they do.

How does your student read?

Reading well relies on dynamic visual skills — to give us the ability to align both eyes on the same word or symbol, to track smoothly across and down lines of text, and to shift focus between near and far.

Conventional eye exams measure acuity, the ability to see detail clearly at 20 feet. Glasses correct acuity (20/20 vision), but they do NOT correct dynamic visual skills. A child may see clearly on an eye chart yet struggle when their focus moves as they read.

Students rarely report these difficulties. They assume everyone sees the same way they do. Teachers and parents cannot “see through their eyes.” As a result, silent reading struggles are often invisible until comprehension breaks down.

Essential Visual Skills for Reading

Reading easily and well relies on more than a dozen visual skills. Only one — visual acuity — is addressed with eyeglasses. Beyond acuity, the skills that matter most for reading fall into several key areas:

For a fuller explanation of each, see The Visual System and Reading.

These skills are underdeveloped in more than half of low-performing elementary students, and about 25% of low-performing middle school students. We call them “underdeveloped” because they can be strengthened like physical skills in sports. These skills have nothing to do with intelligence or ability. While some children outgrow these hurdles, many develop inefficient reading habits to compensate. These habits often persist — even after their vision matures.

Why does Reading Efficiency Matter?

Reading efficiency matters because it decides how much of a student’s attention is free for meaning rather than spent on the mechanics of reading. Efficiency is the quality of working well without wasting time or energy. Inefficient readers work hard just to make their way through the text. Efficient readers find the act of reading easy, and are able to focus their attention on the meaning of what they read. In addition, silent reading is more efficient than reading out loud, enabling us to read more than if we must take the time to vocalize every word.

Inefficient reading is more common than most educators expect. About half of all students in Grades 2–12 read inefficiently — including 70% of students who are not yet proficient and 30% of those who are. And the cost is steep: students in the lowest efficiency quartile read, on average, two to three grade levels below their peers in the highest quartile.

Underdeveloped visual skills often lead to inefficient reading habits:

• Small perceptual span (seeing only 2–3 letters at a time)
• Frequent regressions (jumping backward)
• Too many fixations per word

Even when children “grow out of” early visual lags, inefficient reading habits remain. This explains why so many students never catch up, even with good instruction.

Can Reading Efficiency be Measured?

Yes, just as we can measure a student’s reading level based on text complexity and comprehension. Reading efficiency is measured in words per minute with comprehension. This is not speed reading. The fact is, silent reading should be faster than oral reading. Students need to be efficient silent readers to handle the volume and complexity of upper high-school and college-level work.

Reading efficiency goals increase as students progress through elementary and middle school, just as reading proficiency goals do. The Stanford Taylor Foundation has developed a free online diagnostic tool, Reading Efficiency Insights (REI), to measure individual students’ reading efficiency. Now in pilot testing, REI measures the student’s comprehension-based silent reading rate and compares it to researched, nationally normed rates for levels of efficiency development.

Less precise but still useful is to compare a student’s comfortable silent reading pace to the pace of normal conversation, known as the speaking range. This typically ranges from 150 to 170 words per minute. By the fourth grade, efficient readers are reading silently at or above the speaking range. An efficient middle school reader’s rate is more than 200 words per minute. By contrast, the average U.S. student does not read faster than the speaking range until tenth grade — a gap that shows how far behind inefficient readers can fall.

A silent reading rate below the pace of conversation often indicates that a student’s reading processes lack automaticity. When the mechanics of reading take too much effort, comprehension and engagement suffer. Over time, this strain reduces the student’s reading stamina and often contributes to avoidance and lower motivation to read.

Skills Can Be Developed. Habits Can Be Changed.

Both inefficient reading habits and underdeveloped visual skills can be improved with targeted instruction and practice. Even older students often make rapid progress once they learn efficient reading patterns and strategies.

Like learning to ride a bike or training for sports, once mastered, efficient reading becomes automatic and lifelong.

Ready to Help Your Students Read Better?

The Stanford Taylor Foundation (STF) is developing free tools and resources for teachers and parents to:

• Identify students who read inefficiently and who have underdeveloped visual skills, with reports and instructional recommendations at the individual student, classroom, school, and district levels.
• Build reading efficiency through a research-based practice program.
• Integrate simple, research-based activities into classrooms.

Together, these make up Nimble Reading, STF’s program for reading efficiency and visual skills. We are enrolling free pilot partners for the 2026–27 school year now: the Nimble Insights screeners — Visual Skills Insights and Reading Efficiency Insights — are available to pilot today, and Nimble Practice, the reading efficiency practice program, begins pilots in September 2026.