WILLOUGHBY, Ohio — The fall marks the start of the second school year since Ohio mandated a shift toward phonics-based reading instruction, after years of districts implementing their own reading curriculum.

Prior to this shift, an Ohio Department of Education report pointed out that 39.9% of all Ohio third-grade students are not considered proficient in reading.

That prompted Gov. Mike DeWine to champion what educators call "the science of reading" to address the state's reading proficiency shortcomings, also known as an emphasis on phonics.

A phonics approach involves breaking down a word letter by letter, and a student sounding out the word.

Other methods can teach words as a whole, not individual letters, based on taking context clues, such as other words in a sentence or pictures,

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