Groups are In Education
Elaine Clanton Harpine, Ph.D
Elaine Clanton Harpine is a motivational psychologist specializing in group-centered prevention. In 2021, she was awarded the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She has 50 years of experience designing and conducting motivational prevention programs for children, youth, and adults. National Reading Panel explained that groups are, in fact, more effective than one-on-one tutoring and classroom instruction in bringing about change.
Prevention Groups
A growing crisis is sweeping across the United States. Millions of lives are impacted. This, unfortunately, is not a new crisis. The crisis, which is linked with mental health, impacts cognitive processing, emotional wellbeing, and motivation. The crisis affects people’s ability to regulate anger, anxiety, insecurity, mood changes, depression, bullying, and even violence. This is a crisis that we, as group psychologists, can change. Prevention groups can bring about change. Therefore, it’s time for us to get involved and stop the crisis. The crisis is reading failure.
Wordmetrics reported that 36 million US adults are “functionally illiterate.” They cannot read, and this is causing a nationwide crisis. Reading failure is no longer just a public-school problem. Reading failure is even being cited as a problem in many college classrooms.
Reading failure strongly predicts violent and destructive actions, hyperactivity, and anti-social behavior. The National Council for Adult Literacy states that 85% of juvenile offenders are “functionally illiterate,” while 70% of prison inmates cannot read above the 4th grade level. As far back as 1993, the Department of Justice has claimed that the “link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.” Preventing reading failure is one of the key tools used for reducing violent and aggressive behavior.
For additional information on the impact of reading failure, see Chapter 1 in my book After-School Programming and Intrinsic Motivation (2019). This group-written project cites 8 years of research on prevention groups working to correct reading failure.
Reading failure begins in childhood. The Nation’s Report Card states that in 2024 only 31% of 4th graders, 30% of 8th graders, and only 35% of 12 graders (at graduation) could read at the proficiency level for their grade level (the 2026 scores have not been posted yet). The other students, approximately 60%, are reading below the proficiency level for their grade. That’s more than half the students at every grade level.
Many claim that low scores were caused by the pandemic. That view, however, understates the problem. Professor Tom Kane from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University described the pandemic as the “mudslide” but not the problem. He shows that the issues arose more than a decade before the pandemic. Earlier this year on May 13th, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth released a study comparing approximately 70 million 3rd through 8th grade students during the years from 2009 to 2025. Their findings showed that only five states as well as the District of Columbia showed any meaningful improvement, whereas 8th-grade reading scores are still at their lowest since 1990. Overall, across the nation, students are nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic scores, while the pre-pandemic scores were already below grade level for most students.
You may be saying “that’s terrible, but I’m a psychologist, not a classroom teacher.” Nevertheless, the National Reading Panel explained that groups are, in fact, more effective than one-on-one tutoring and classroom instruction in bringing about change. Group psychologists have the knowledge, skills, and training to facilitate groups that bring about mental wellness and change. A positive prevention group experience can help heal the pain of failure as it teaches the skills needed to succeed. We create a stronger life-changing experience when we combine counseling with learning.
Although I have retired and spend most of my time walking on the beach collecting seashells or working in my rose garden, my 2019 research demonstrated that group-centered prevention groups can help students move up four grade levels in reading in one school year by combining counseling and learning. [See Shana Ingram’s analysis in Chapter 9 of After-School Programming and Intrinsic Motivation (2019).]
So, yes, we as psychologists can bring about change. Prevention groups work, but only if we, as psychologists, organize prevention groups that help to alleviate the crisis. It’s not too late. We can even start today.
To learn more about the research discussed, read:
Clanton Harpine, E. (Ed.), (2019). After-school programming and intrinsic motivation: Teaching at-risk students to read. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
National Center for Education Statistics, (2026). The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2026 . National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of education sciences, US Department of Education, Washington DC. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR), Educational Opportunity Project (EOP), and Dartmouth College. (2026). Education Scorecard: 2026. Harvard University. https://educationscorecard.org