Research on the 4th Grade Slump

This article from Educational Leadership was very interesting to me since I spent so many years in 4th grade. It's about students who have performed well in school but suddenly start to slump around the age of 9 or 10. Here's a paragraph from early in the article:

Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) noted that 4th grade is a critical transition period, when students move from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." The slump, they suggested, might be related to students struggling to shift from reading relatively easy, familiar words and passages to using their reading skills to acquire new knowledge from increasingly difficult words and texts. For some students, encountering these more difficult texts may unearth a previously undetected lack of fluency and automaticity.

The article goes on to talk about variations in vocabulary knowledge and students' prior knowledge and how it affects reading ability and ends with a paragraph about what schools can do.  Here's a key paragraph from that section:

Researchers have identified a number of solutions for addressing the slump, starting with providing good reading instruction in the early grades. Direct vocabulary instruction is important ... however ... by one estimate, explicit vocabulary instruction can teach, at best, about 400 words a year (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002)... On the other hand, estimates based on the research of William Nagy indicate that if students read widely one hour per day, five days per week, they'd likely learn at least 2,250 words per year—possibly much more (Stone & Urquhart, 2008).

You can see why I liked that paragraph.  Here's the full article.