New Study Shows Boys Lagging Behind Girls in Reading

I read the article, New Study Shows Boys Lagging Behind Girls in Reading by Ron Claiborne and Hanna Siegel on the NCTE inbox. As a future teacher I found this article extremely compelling. The studies have shown across all 50 states that girls have achieved higher reading achievements than boys. The study shows that this result is not only true in every state but it is true amongst every grade level as well.
In my own personal experiences working in a prekindergarten and first grade classrooms I have never noticed this trend. After reading this article I am now looking back at my interactions with the children and am seeing this has been a trend, I have just been blind to it until now. I work in a prekindergarten classroom over the summer months with very bright children. Each of the children are able to read a few words, that is true for both the female and males in the class. However, there were two children within the class that were starting to read actual books by the end of the summer. Both of these children were girls. I also work in a first grade classroom at Clymore Elementary once a week this semester. I help out with the reading and writing groups during the mornings. There are two different level groups, the advanced readers and the slow readers. The majority of the students in the advanced group are girls. There are ten students in the group and only three of them are male students. Meanwhile in the slow reading group the ratio of girls to boys is about equal. Although I have never personally noticed this difference in reading ability it is a present trend in the schools I personally have worked in.
There are several theories associated with the reasoning behind this trend but as a future educator I am more concerned with how to fix this rising problem. We need o take the time to address the situation, and spend more time getting the male students interested in reading. We need to make sure our assigned books and available free reads in the classroom are of interest to both the female and male students. It is proven a child is more likely to want to read, or learn in general if it is about a topic they are interested in. Therefore we need to make sure we have appropriate reading materials that interest the boys as well as the girls in our classrooms. There are several steps we as teachers need to take to help close this gap instead of allowing it to widen even further. I believe grabbing boys interest in reading is the first step to achieving this goal, and I believe it should begin at the early stages of literacy.