Bridging the Literacy Gap: Environmental Influences on 5th Grade Reading in African American Students

School reading success among students, particularly African American students, is a multifaceted process influenced by various factors. This study examines the complex nature of reading success, highlighting two critical areas of reading: (a) phonemic awareness, which includes phonics, fluency, and spelling skills, and (b) morphological awareness, which includes areas such as vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. The problem with African American students' school reading success is that African American students, on average, continue to exhibit lower reading proficiency than other races. Despite the heightened volume of research dedicated to understanding and improving the reading performance of African American students, only a few have focused on environmental factors associated with Grade 5 reading success within cities in the United States. With Brofenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory (EST) as the theoretical framework, the researcher examined the association of the socio-economic status of a student's family, the family's attendance of religious services, and the school's connection to families and communities to the reading achievement of Grade 5 African American students within cities in the United States. In this secondary analysis of the longitudinal data set Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K: 2011), a nationally representative sample of 1,081 children, the researcher used a multiple linear regression analysis. Quantitative findings using the regression model yielded the significance for socio-economic status, F (3, 1052) =52.718, p<.001, indicating that this predictor explains a significant variance in the reading scores in Grade 5 African American students living in a city. Within the three variables, the family's attendance of religious services resulted in the least impactful reading outcomes of Grade 5 African American students who live in a city. Implications for future research include examining whether environmental factors affect male and female students differently or not. Future research recommendations involve examining the relationship between the percentages of different ethnicities who enroll in post-secondary studies compared to their early academic achievement in reading.