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Elementary Grades (3-5) Assessment Tasks

The tasks are organized by grade and Performance Expectation (PE). For each PE, we present a set of less broad but more manageable three dimensional performance statements that we call Learning Performances (LPs), which collectively describe the performances that students need to demonstrate as they progress toward achieving that PE. For more detail about the design process used to develop these tasks go to nextgenscienceassessment.org/design-process

Development of these tasks and associated resources is on-going. Future updates will add new tasks for additional Grade 3-5 PEs, update existing tasks, and add teacher guides.

These tasks were developed through a collaborative effort of University of Illinois at Chicago, UChicago STEM Education, and the Concord Consortium, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

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The tasks are organized by grade and Performance Expectation (PE). For each PE, we present a set of less broad but more manageable three dimensional performance statements that we call Learning Performances (LPs), which collectively describe the performances that students need to demonstrate as they progress toward achieving that PE.

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Ambitious Science Teaching - Elem. Units

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This page will introduce you to the kinds of tools that are available on this site. The tools in the gallery below were created over the past five years in collaboration with classroom teachers who have used them successfully with students. Below, there are four broad types of tools that you can search for; click on any of these to learn more about the tools (the planning tools were designed by us after a thorough review of the literature on teaching and learning, all the rest by our colleagues in schools):

Also check our "How do I...?" page for quick reads on modeling, use of evidence, making thinking visible, direct instruction, group work, anchoring events, more...

Except where otherwise noted, this work by Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching, University of Washington, is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 License. All logos and trademarks are property of their respective owners. Images in this work are used with permission and not included in the open license.

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This page will introduce you to the kinds of tools that are available on this site. The tools in the gallery below were created over the past five years in collaboration with classroom teachers who have used them successfully with students.

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Partnership Institute for Math and Science Education Reform - Providing customized professional learning for educators in math, science, and leadership

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Science Resources - Partnership Institute for Math and Science Education Reform

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Encouraging Academic Conversations with Talk MovesWhat strategies can you take away for managing student Talk Moves? All content areas and grade levels can benefit from the strategies used by the teacher and students in this ELA 8th grade class,. Modeling & Simulations Wolfram Demonstration ProjectDemonstrations can be used to enliven a classroom, visualize complex concepts

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Causes & working memory

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Despite billions of dollars and massive efforts on the part of thousands of highly dedicated and intelligent people over the past 25 years, the size of the test-score gap between the wealthiest and the poorest students hasn't changed. ¹ Our mediocre standing on international literacy rankings is largely a reflection of how low our lowest scores are. ² Teachers in high-poverty schools in Washington, D.C., have told me they've had students at all levels of ability, including the highest, but some of their stories were deeply disturbing.

Their high school students often lack a sense of chronology, they said. Students may confuse the Civil War and the civil rights movement. They may think Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. were contemporaries. In a world history class studying the segregation faced by black soldiers returning to the United States after World War I, some students were under the impression that slavery still existed in 1918. In a course on the United States after the Civil War, the teacher couldn't assume that students knew what happened before that war, even though they had already taken a class that covered it. "You have to start with: there was a War of Independence," she said, "and this is who we won our independence from." ³

Others told me their students don't understand the difference between a country and a continent, or between a city and a state. One kid in an SAT prep class-one of the better students, according to his teacher, who cited the fact that "he could place the United States on a world map"-was surprised by the term South America when he saw it on a map, apparently for the first time: How could it be called America if it wasn't in America? ⁴

Another high school teacher said she's even had a few students who don't know the name of the country they live in. "They think Washington, D.C., is their country," she said. ⁵

Urban school systems have been faced with the impossible task of turning ninth-graders who arrive with gaps like these into "college- and career-ready" graduates in four years-and threatened with consequences under federal law if graduation rates dip below 67 percent. For a while, the threats appeared to be working: in 2016, the national graduation rate reached an all-time high of more than 84 percent. ⁶ But within months, it became clear that some urban school systems had turned to subterfuges. ⁷ These included having students pass courses by taking far less rigorous online versions and changing attendance records. In Washington, D.C.-a city that many reformers have pointed to as a model, and where the graduation rate rose 20 points in six years-an investigation revealed that a full third of the 2017 graduates hadn't met requirements. ⁸

These problems don't end at high school. Studies suggest that students with low test scores are less likely to pursue higher education, obtain and keep jobs, provide for their families, exercise their civic rights and responsibilities, and lead fulfilling lives. ⁹ Education is supposed to enable everyone to do those things. It represents our best hope for breaking the cycle of multigenerational poverty. Really, it's our only hope.

And it's not working. Socioeconomic inequality in the United States is on the rise. ¹⁰ Many students proudly enroll in college-the surest route to success-only to discover they're so ill-prepared they need to take remedial reading and math. The vast majority of lower-income students never manage to get that coveted degree. ¹¹

Knowledge Makes a Difference

In 1987, two researchers in Wisconsin, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, conducted an experiment that shed some light on the roots of many of the problems that afflict our education system-and especially the gap in test scores between students at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale. They constructed a miniature baseball field, ¹² installed it in an empty classroom in a junior high school, and peopled it with four-inch wooden baseball players arranged to simulate the beginning of a game. Then they brought in 64 seventh- and eighth-grade students who had been tested both for their general reading ability and for their knowledge of baseball.

The goal was to determine to what extent a child's ability to understand a text depended on her prior knowledge of the topic. Recht and Leslie chose baseball because they figured lots of kids in junior high school who weren't great readers nevertheless knew a fair amount about the subject. Each student was asked to read a text describing half an inning of a fictional baseball game and move the wooden figures around the board to reenact the action described.

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop, the passage began. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars' left-fielder.

It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in students' ability to understand the text-more of a difference than their supposed reading level. ¹³ The kids who knew little about baseball, including the "good" readers, all did poorly. And among those who knew a lot about baseball, the "good" readers and the "bad" readers all did well. In fact, the bad readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the good readers who didn't.

In another study, researchers read preschoolers from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds a book about birds, a subject they had determined the higher-income kids already knew more about. When they tested comprehension, the wealthier children did significantly better. But then they read a story about a subject neither group knew anything about: made-up animals called wugs. When prior knowledge was equalized, comprehension was essentially the same. ¹⁴ In other words, the gap in comprehension wasn't a gap in skills. It was a gap in knowledge.

The implication is clear: abstract "reading ability" is largely a mirage constructed by reading tests. A student's ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on many factors, prime among them being his familiarity with the topic. While instruction in the early grades has focused on "learning to read" rather than "reading to learn," many educators have overlooked the fact that part of learning to read is acquiring knowledge.

Research has established that one aspect of reading does need to be taught and practiced as a set of skills, much like math: decoding, the part that involves matching sounds to letters. (For more on decoding, see the article on page 4.) The problem is that the other aspect of reading-comprehension-is also being taught that way. The prevailing approach is to focus on skills and strategies such as "finding the main idea" and "making inferences," with students practicing the skills on books on random topics that have been determined to match their individual reading levels. While there's plenty of evidence that some instruction in some comprehension strategies can be helpful for some children, there's no reason to believe it can turn struggling readers into accomplished ones.

That's particularly true when it comes to nonfiction, which generally assumes more specialized background knowledge. To acquire the knowledge and vocabulary that will help them understand nonfiction, children need to do more than read a single book on a topic before skipping to another one while practicing how to identify text features or determine text structure. They need to stick with a topic for days or weeks, encountering the same vocabulary and concepts repeatedly so they will stick. ¹⁵

It's not so much that particular bits of information are vital in and of themselves-although some certainly are. It's more that people need to have enough facts in their heads to have what one commentator has called "a knowledge party" ¹⁶ -a bunch of accumulated associations that will enable them to absorb, retain, and analyze new information. Education certainly shouldn't end with facts. But if it doesn't begin there, many students will never acquire the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive both in school and in life.

Vocabulary Is Essential, but Not Enough

It's not that educators are unaware of the importance of knowledge and vocabulary. One frequently taught reading comprehension strategy is "activating prior knowledge." If the story is about a trip on an airplane, for example, the teacher might ask kids if they've ever taken one. And if a text assumes knowledge many students don't have, he might quickly supply it. But that kind of on-the-spot injection of information is unlikely to stick without reinforcement. ¹⁷

Teachers are more likely to be aware of the need to build students' vocabulary rather than their knowledge; those gaps are more obvious, and more research has been done on the importance of vocabulary to comprehension. To be sure, it's important to focus on words that are used frequently in academic writing but are unlikely to be acquired through spoken language-words like merchant, fortunate, and benevolent. ¹⁸ But it's impossible to equip children with all the vocabulary they need by teaching it to them directly. During the first several years of schooling, children add eight words a day to their vocabularies, on average; ¹⁹ the only way to expand vocabulary that quickly is to expand knowledge. A single word is often just the tip of an iceberg of concepts and meanings, inseparable from the knowledge in which it is embedded. If you understand the word oar, for example, you're probably also familiar with the concepts of rowboats and paddling.

But building knowledge is trickier than teaching vocabulary. Teachers sometimes overestimate what children already know: I watched a class of second-graders struggle for half an hour through a text about slavery before their teacher realized they didn't understand the word slavery. Kindergartners in one low-income community had an average score in the fifth percentile on a vocabulary test, ²⁰ which reflected their inability to identify pictures showing the meanings of words like penguin, sewing, or parachute, and educators have told me of students who don't know simple words like behind and bead.

At the same time, teachers can underestimate students' capabilities. In addition to limiting children to books at their supposed levels, they may explain an entire text in simple language before reading it aloud, thus depriving students of the chance to wrest meaning from complex language themselves. (For more on misconceptions about reading levels, see the article here.)

"I believe what everybody believes," said one fifth-grade teacher at a high-poverty school in Nevada. "I don't mean to believe it, but it gets into you-this idea that certain learners are less capable of engaging with certain content. And I think that we've been making a lot of mistakes based in compassion for our students.... We make this great effort to smooth the road for them."

After experimenting with a text she was sure would be too challenging for her students-and being surprised by how well they did-she came to realize that she'd been doing them a disservice. "Unless they learn to navigate the bumps," she said, "we're not teaching them to be thinkers or readers." ²¹

Knowledge Is Like Velcro

There are multiple reasons that children from less-educated families arrive at school with less knowledge and vocabulary than their peers from highly educated ones-many having to do with wealth and income, which are highly correlated with levels of education. Children who live in poverty are far more likely to suffer the consequences of traumatic events that can interfere with their ability to learn. ²² Wealthier parents are better able to invest in their children; ²³ that can mean anything from buying more books to paying for tutoring or extracurricular activities.

In recent years, the difference between what lower- and higher-income parents spend on their children has increased dramatically. In 1972, the wealthiest Americans were spending five times as much per child as the lowest-income families. By 2007, parents at all economic levels were spending more on their children, but the highest-income families were spending nine times as much. ²⁴ As "human capital"-skills and education-has become increasingly vital to success, families in the top 20 percent have invested more heavily in ensuring their children can compete. It's become increasingly difficult for the bottom 80 percent to keep up.

Poor and working-class families are also more likely to practice "natural growth" parenting, according to sociologist Annette Lareau, allowing their children lots of unstructured time and tending to give directions rather than soliciting opinions. Middle-class and affluent families, on the other hand, generally practice "concerted cultivation": driving their kids to soccer practice and band recitals, engaging in family debates at dinnertime, and encouraging independent thinking. Each parenting style has its advantages, but the concerted cultivation kids are better equipped to do well in school. ²⁵

And then there's language. Children whose parents read to them frequently become familiar with the sophisticated vocabulary and syntax that appears in written rather than spoken language. ²⁶ Talking is important too. One much-publicized study published in the 1990s estimated that high-income children hear 30 million more words than low-income children by age 4. ²⁷ Recent research has called that estimate into question and focused instead on the number of "conversational turns," or back-and-forth verbal interactions, between parents and children; the more conversational turns, the better a child's language skills. ²⁸ And-although the ubiquity of cell phones and other screens has interfered with conversational turns across the spectrum-on average, higher-income families engage in more of them. ²⁹

Less-educated parents are also less likely to use complex vocabulary in conversation, and teachers may not be exposing students to it either. One study found that children living in high-poverty neighborhoods get "a double dose of disadvantage" as compared to their higher-income peers: the language they hear is less sophisticated both at home and at school. While these children "may have unique linguistic strengths that serve them well in their immediate settings," they were less likely to have the language skills that would enable them to do well academically. ³⁰

Whatever the causes, it's clear that children with certain risk factors begin school with skills that may be almost a year behind those of their peers. ³¹ And the gap only widens over time. ³² The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She'll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge.

This phenomenon of snowballing knowledge accumulation by kids who start out with more-while those who start out with less acquire less-has been dubbed "the Matthew effect." ³³ That's a reference to a line in the Gospel according to Matthew-"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath": or, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." And the longer the Matthew effect is allowed to continue, the harder it is to reverse. That's why it's crucial to envelop students from less-educated families in a knowledge-building environment as early as possible.

Rather than being restricted to the simple material they can read on their own, young children need to listen to their teachers read more complex books aloud and engage in discussions about what they've heard-and, depending on their age, write about it. ³⁴ Even many middle schoolers can take in far more sophisticated content, and the vocabulary that goes with it, through listening and speaking than through their own reading. ³⁵ If teachers organize their read-alouds by topic instead of the skill-of-the-week, children have the chance to hear the same concepts and vocabulary repeatedly. Once they have a general familiarity with a topic, they can read more difficult text about it independently.

The Role of Working Memory

When we try to make sense of what we read, we rely on what cognitive scientists refer to as working memory, something psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham has called the staging ground for thought. Another definition might be consciousness. It's the process whereby we take in new information and combine it with the facts and procedures stored in our long-term memory. The key thing about working memory is that it has a limited capacity. And information in working memory is lost if it isn't quickly "rehearsed"-perhaps articulated or written about. By one estimate, the limit is just 15 to 30 seconds. ³⁶

So time is of the essence when trying to assimilate new information. If we can relate it to something we already know, it speeds up the process considerably. If we need to stop and look up every other word, or puzzle them out from context, we're far less likely to be able to understand and retain what we're reading.

Background knowledge, Willingham explains, also enables a reader to engage in something called chunking. Let's say the text in the 1987 baseball experiment said that the shortstop threw the ball to the second baseman, who threw the ball to the first baseman, resulting in two runners being out. The students who knew a lot about baseball could "chunk" those actions by recognizing them as a double play. But those who knew little about baseball would have to try to remember each step in the series of actions described, which occupies more space in working memory.

Scientists also use the word schema to describe this process. A schema is a mental framework constructed from accumulated information and experience and stored in long-term memory. When people already have a schema for a topic, new information on that topic has something it can stick to. If knowledge about baseball helps readers understand a text about baseball, it follows that knowledge about the world in general equips readers to do well on a test that covers a variety of subjects. And that's exactly what experiments have shown. ³⁷

There's no one right way to provide a high-quality education, and this country is too big and varied for one-size-fits-all prescriptions. But if we're equipped with a basic scientific understanding about which methods are most effective-and most likely to provide an engaging experience for kids-we should all be able to distinguish between approaches that are likely to produce the outcomes we want and those that will only lead to a heartbreaking waste of precious time. The best first step is for a school or district to adopt one of the new content-focused elementary literacy curricula that have appeared on the market-and in some cases online, for free-over the past several years.

We'll need to simultaneously pursue many other reform efforts, of course, including improving teacher training, ensuring that students living in poverty get the mental health and support services they need, and engaging families in their children's learning. But if we don't also give students access to knowledge of the world during elementary school, we'll never achieve the result we want: a system that equips all students to lead productive and fulfilling lives and carry out their responsibilities as members of a democratic society.

Natalie Wexler is an education journalist and coauthor with Judith C. Hochman of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. This article is an excerpt from her book The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-and How to Fix It (Avery). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright 2019 by Wexler.

Endnotes

1. E. Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap Fails to Close," Education Next 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019).
2. S. D. Sparks, "Global Reading Scores Are Rising, but Not for U.S. Students," Education Week, December 5, 2017.
3. Kerry Sylvia, former teacher at Cardozo Education Campus, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, July 12, 2016.
4. David Tansey, former teacher at Dunbar High School, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, April 30, 2016.
5. Kim Stalnaker, teacher at Eastern Senior High School, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, June 16, 2016.
6. M. Balingit, "U.S. High School Graduation Rates Rise to New High," Washington Post, December 4, 2017.
7. M. Dynarski, "Is the High School Graduation Rate Really Going Up?," Brookings (blog), May 3, 2018.
8. K. McGee, "In D.C., 34 Percent of Graduates Received a Diploma against District Policy," NPR, January 29, 2018.
9. R. Chetty, J. N. Friedman, and J. Rockoff, "Great Teaching," Education Next 12, no. 3 (Summer 2012); and E. A. Hanushek et al., "Education and Economic Growth," Education Next 8, no. 2 (Spring 2008).
10. K. G. Bates, "Report Updates Landmark 1968 Racism Study, Finds More Poverty and Segregation," NPR, February 27, 2018; D. DeSilver, "U.S. Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, Is Now Highest since 1928," Fact Tank (blog), Pew Research Center, December 5, 2013; and R. V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017).
11. D. L. Kirp, "Ending the Curse of Remedial Math," New York Times, June 10, 2017. More than two-thirds of community college students need to take remedial math or English classes, which cost them money but don't earn them any credit. Only 15 percent of these students get their degrees on time.
12. L. Holt, "The Baseball Experiment: How Two Wisconsin Researchers Discovered That the Comprehension Gap Is a Knowledge Gap," Amplify Blog, accessed July 28, 2018.
13. D. R. Recht and L. Leslie, "Effect of Prior Knowledge on Good and Poor Readers' Memory of Text," Journal of Educational Psychology 80, no. 1 (March 1988): 16-20.
14. T. Kaefer, S. B. Neuman, and A. M. Pinkham, "Pre-Existing Background Knowledge Influences Socioeconomic Differences in Preschoolers' Word Learning and Comprehension," Reading Psychology 36, no. 3 (2015): 203-231.
15. G. N. Cervetti, T. S. Wright, and H. Hwang, "Conceptual Coherence, Comprehension, and Vocabulary Acquisition: A Knowledge Effect?," Reading and Writing 29, no. 4 (April 2016): 761-779.
16. M. Fordham, "The Knowledge Party in My Head," Clio et cetera (blog), November 21, 2016, www.clioetcetera.com/2016/11/21/the-knowledge-party-in-my-head.
17. D. T. Willingham, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 89.
18. I. Beck, M. McKeown, and L. Kucan, "Choosing Words to Teach," in Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), 15-30.
19. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight and Sound: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done about It (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 111-113; and Cervetti, Wright, and Hwang, "Conceptual Coherence."
20. L. C. Moats, "Overcoming the Language Gap," American Educator 25, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 8-9.
21. Linnea Wolters, quoted in E. Hanford, "Common Core Reading: 'The New Colossus,' " NPR, November 11, 2014.
22. N. B. Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); and M. Kirk, "What Kids' Trauma Looks Like across the U.S.," The Atlantic, February 27, 2018.
23. E. Caucutt, "Why Do Poor Children Perform More Poorly Than Rich Ones?," The Conversation, April 23, 2015, www.theconversation.com/why-do-poor-children-perform-more-poorly-than-r....
24. S. Tavernise, "Education Gap Grows between Rich and Poor, Studies Say," New York Times, February 10, 2012.
25. A. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
26. M. Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 85-90.
27. B. Hart and T. R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Brookes Publishing, 1995).
28. A. Trafton, "Back-and-Forth Exchanges Boost Children's Brain Response to Language," MIT News, February 13, 2018.
29. E. Christakis, "The Dangers of Distracted Parenting," The Atlantic, July/August 2018.
30. S. B. Neuman, T. Kaefer, and A. M. Pinkham, "A Double Dose of Disadvantage: Language Experiences for Low-Income Children in Home and School," Journal of Educational Psychology 110, no. 1 (January 2018): 102-118.
31. S. Bernstein et al., "Kindergartners' Skills at School Entry: An Analysis of the ECLS-K," Mathematica Policy Research, July 15, 2014, 3.
32. J. S. Chall and V. A. Jacobs, "The Classic Study on Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump," American Educator 27, no. 1 (Spring 2003). On nationwide reading tests, the gaps don't appear to increase much if you look only at standard deviations, which is the way the results are reported. But it takes far more work to make up one standard deviation at upper grade levels than at lower grade levels. In the early grades, a student might need to make up only one grade level to move up a standard deviation. By eighth grade, it would take three grade levels to move up one standard deviation-and far more at the high school level. David Grissmer, research professor, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, conversation with author, April 27, 2016.
33. K. Stanovich, "Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy," Reading Research Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 360-407.
34. M. J. Adams, "Advancing Our Students' Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts," American Educator 34, no. 4 (Winter 2010-2011): 5; and S. L. Hall and L. C. Moats, "Why Reading to Children Is Important," American Educator 24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 26-33. While class discussion is also important, teachers need to read aloud to children because virtually all written language uses more complex vocabulary and syntax than spoken language, with the only exception being expert witness testimony.
35. D. Fisher and N. Frey, "Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning," The Reading Teacher 68, no. 1 (September 2014): 64-69.
36. R. C. Atkinson and R. M. Shiffrin, "Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its Control Processes," in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Theory and Research, vol. 2, ed. K. W. Spence and J. T. Spence (New York: Academic Press, 1968), 89-195.
37. D. T. Willingham, "School Time, Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension," Science and Education (blog), March 7, 2012.

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Despite billions of dollars and massive efforts on the part of thousands of highly dedicated and intelligent people over the past 25 years, the size of the test-score gap between the wealthiest and the poorest students hasn't changed. 1 Our mediocre standing on international literacy rankings is largely a reflection of how low our lowest scores are.

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations. Today, although groups are now labeled with letters (Level G, Level L, etc.) and ornithological monikers are out of fashion, assigning students to instructional groups according to their reading levels is still a common practice in classrooms across the country.

A recent survey aimed at identifying the most popular current programs used to teach reading ¹ found that one common feature of all the top sellers was that they organize their teaching around leveled books. Other recent surveys show that teaching reading with leveled books is on the increase and that teachers believe it is endorsed or supported by their state educational standards, ² though, in most cases, it is not.

But how effective is such teaching? Does it work?

On the surface, those are easy questions. Leveled readers obviously work. Most American students are learning to read, at least at basic levels, ³ and since most are being taught with leveled books, there must be some potency in the approach.

But the real question isn't whether children can learn from leveled books, but whether such leveling confers any learning advantages. Might students do even better if taught with books they can't already read so well? That's the real question. In this article, I examine the research on leveled reading approaches and offer more effective ways that classroom teachers can ensure their students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to not only read a text but also comprehend it. First, I provide a brief history lesson in how we got here.

Teaching with Gradually More Difficult Texts

The idea of testing students to place them in different levels of text for instruction was first recommended more than 100 years ago, ⁴ and an early survey indicated that 58 percent of primary-grade reading instruction was already being delivered in small ability-based groups and that 42 percent of the teachers were adjusting text levels to facilitate learning. ⁵ They may not have referred to these texts as "leveled readers," and no company that published basal readers had yet coined the term "guided reading," but the practices of that time were markedly similar to those of today.

During the 20th century, research identified text features that correlate with reading comprehension, ⁶ and publishers started to control these features to a degree previously unimagined. One reading program I remember from my childhood bragged that it never introduced more than one new word per page, and any word that was introduced was repeated 15 times over the following pages. That's why those texts could be so mind-numbingly repetitive: "Oh. Oh. Oh. Look, Jane, look." If learning to read meant learning words-and at least since the time of Horace Mann that's been an idea held by many-then the accumulation of words gradually from selection to selection was how someone would best advance in learning to read.

But such tight readability controls made beginning reading texts so artificial that they eventually elicited an adverse reaction. The most remarkable of these reactions was the adoption of "whole language" policies by California in the 1980s. ⁷ These reforms required that the texts used to teach reading not be designed for reading instruction, and severely limited the text revisions that could be made for pedagogical purposes. What this meant was that for a brief period of time, even the beginning reading materials got much harder, ⁸ perhaps so hard for beginning readers that they represented a significant impediment to learning. ⁹ If the old basal readers were easier than necessary, these new books were decidedly too hard for the beginners, and they provided teachers with little or no guidance on how to teach with texts that the older students couldn't read successfully on their own. Exacerbating the effects of these harder books was that California's policies simultaneously discouraged phonics and spelling-instruction that could have helped students to better read the challenging materials, and the term "whole language" often came to mean "whole class" instruction in many schools. ¹⁰ Perhaps the thinking was, why group for instruction if nobody could read the books anyway?

It was in this environment that Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell published their landmark book in 1996, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. There was nothing terribly original in their presentation, but they rediscovered and championed a set of teaching procedures that in the not-too-distant past had been widely used to facilitate reading instruction. They recognized that texts varied in difficulty and that one could guide student progress successfully across a gradually harder progression of books. To do this successfully, they asserted that teachers would need to group children, matching different books to students based on their varied levels of reading. Their approach offered immediate relief for those beginning reading classes where easier books made sense, but even in the grades beyond, the shift was welcome because of the lack of any pedagogical support for teaching challenging books. Fountas and Pinnell's approach, although reminiscent of earlier popular instructional practices, differed from them in one important regard: because of the burgeoning availability of high-quality children's trade books, they could propose doing this without textbooks.

In the Fountas and Pinnell version of guided reading, teachers assess students to determine their reading levels and then assign them books that they can read with a high degree of accuracy and comprehension. Over time, if retesting shows improvement, the students are switched to more demanding books. When it doesn't work so well, students may languish for long periods at their current levels. Such languishment has been enough of a problem that in the second edition of their book, they recommend moving students up sometimes even when the testing shows no evident improvement. (This seems to me like a judicious amendment to the original plan, but it raises the question about why these students can be expected to learn from the harder books when it is assumed that no one else would be able to.) Currently, this approach to reading, in which leveled books are matched to student reading levels for reading instruction, predominates in U.S. classrooms.

Determining Text Levels

There are basically two ways to determine how difficult texts may be and to set their levels: quantitative readability measures and qualitative judgments about texts. Although they approach the task differently, the purpose of both is to array texts on a continuum of difficulty.

The quantitative study of readability identifies text features that may affect comprehension and then tries to array these features in an algorithm that will allow accurate predictions of text difficulty. It turns out that accurate predictions can be obtained with only two text variables: vocabulary and sentence complexity. Such formulas are imperfect, but reasonably accurate. They aren't able to make fine distinctions, and until recently, haven't been able to measure beginning text levels very well. Nevertheless, quantitative readability algorithms are able to provide a largely reliable and accurate scientifically derived text gradient.

Still, it is important to remember that readability was not developed to match books to students in a way that would facilitate learning. Readability measures predict comprehension, not reading progress. The idea of using these kinds of measures to establish which books would best promote learning to read came later.

With the advent of computer technology, readability measurement has improved. ¹¹ The newer readability measures that have emerged are now widely used by researchers and publishers and were employed by the Common Core State Standards to specify text level aspirations for the various grade levels. Despite all this, when teachers speak of "leveling" books, they are most likely referring to Fountas and Pinnell levels.

Researchers provide a useful history of the development of this qualitative leveling system. ¹² Basically, an early version of the approach was developed for use with Reading Recovery, ¹³ a short-term reading intervention for first-graders who have difficulty learning to read, and Fountas and Pinnell refined and expanded this system to apply to texts from beginning readers through eighth-grade texts. Texts are evaluated by judges who place them on a multipoint continuum (from A to Z) based on 10 criteria: genre/forms, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, and book and print features. ¹⁴

No studies have evaluated the reliability of these judgments, but a couple of small studies suggest that the Fountas and Pinnell gradient correlates reasonably well with the better-validated quantitative readability measurements. ¹⁵ Publishers have now leveled tens of thousands of books using this scheme. But given its complexity-the simultaneous qualitative evaluations of 10 factors with no explicit prioritization rules-it is unclear how accurate these levels may be (a point Fountas and Pinnell themselves make ¹⁶). Clearly, this approach lacks the scientific rigor of the quantitative approaches and may result in varied book placements depending on who makes the judgments. But until more evidence is available, let's at least for the sake of argument accept that these levels are sufficiently accurate to consider their use.

To sum up, there are two approaches to setting text levels-one based on a great deal of scientific evidence and one less well understood. Nevertheless, existing data suggest that both can place texts on a reasonable comprehensibility continuum, from easy to difficult. The problem is that research does not support the idea that either approach can identify from which texts students will learn best. The point of leveling is both to establish a text gradient and to place students in the appropriate text along that gradient. The latter is the issue to which we now turn.

Book Levels That Promote Learning

More than 70 years ago, Emmett Betts published an influential textbook on the teaching of reading. ¹⁷ Betts claimed all readers have three reading levels: independent, instructional, and frustration. According to Betts, the independent level refers to texts that readers can handle on their own without assistance. Instructional-level texts are a bit harder, but not so hard that students can't improve their reading from working with them under the guidance of a good teacher. And, frustration level? These books would be so difficult that learning would be unlikely even with supportive teaching.

Betts wrote that the way to determine these levels was to have students read from the books aloud and answer comprehension questions. Instructional-level texts, according to Betts, were those that could be read with 95-98 percent accuracy (in terms of word reading) and understood with 75-89 percent comprehension-the criteria that continue to be used today. Instructional-level texts generate small numbers of mistakes and misunderstandings, which can then presumably be addressed successfully through instruction and practice. Betts claimed that research supported the idea of matching books to students in this way to optimize learning. This instructional-level scheme is what is used today in most popular reading programs.

It's easy to understand why someone might propose (or adopt) such an approach. It is incredibly frustrating when students can't read a text very well. At a time when teachers were limited to one grade-level text for reading, there would be plenty of students who wouldn't be able to read it proficiently. Under those circumstances, teachers would gladly embrace the idea of working only with books that children could already read well. But as gratifying as the idea of teaching students at their instructional levels may have been, there are legitimate questions about the degree of effectiveness of this approach. When there is so little to learn from a particular text, it is possible that progress will be needlessly slow moving.

Despite Betts' original claims and the current popularity of leveling, research evidence has not been especially supportive of the approach. The study Betts referred to as the source of the instructional-level criteria was a doctoral dissertation of one of his students, ¹⁸ and that study neither matched books to students for instruction nor evaluated learning. Betts' doctoral student simply checked to see how many oral reading errors fourth-graders could make and still maintain 75-89 percent reading comprehension; that was the source of the 95-98 percent accuracy criterion. Years later, the researchers were questioned about the source of comprehension numbers, and they couldn't remember from whence those had come. ¹⁹ Not a very substantial basis for such a widely recommended instructional practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, William Powell challenged Betts' criteria, though he fully accepted the kind of evidence Betts had used to set them. ²⁰ Powell thought Betts got the numbers wrong. To that end, he conducted studies in which children from grades 1-8 were evaluated in much the same way as in Betts' doctoral student's study. Powell found a couple of interesting things. He reported different instructional levels for different grades; that is, some children could tolerate more disfluency and still comprehend what they were reading. He also reported that some students could tolerate quite a bit of disfluency, suggesting Betts was placing students in books that were too easy.

Later, another study tested how well second-graders could read the books they were taught with, and then measured how much they learned. The researcher found that texts that could be read with about 85 percent accuracy and less than 50 percent comprehension led to the biggest learning gains. In other words, students learned more from books that were at their "frustration levels."

Over the past few decades, there have been several direct tests of the instructional level, and these have all ended with one of two outcomes. Instructional-level texts either have provided no learning advantages or have done harm. One example of the latter is another study with second-graders. ²¹ This study was the first randomized control trial of this practice. Students were tested and, using Betts' criteria, randomly assigned to one of three treatments. One group worked with texts at their instructional levels, one worked with texts two grades above this, and the third worked with books four grades above. Students read in pairs, practicing reading fluency with a partner. At the end of the school year, the students placed in books above their instructional level had made significantly bigger learning gains than those placed in the books supposed to facilitate their learning. This study was later replicated with third-graders. ²² Other studies again found big learning advantages from working with books at the children's grade levels rather than reading levels. ²³ Even students with learning disabilities have been found to obtain no benefit from these text placements. ²⁴

Betts saw a problem-students being taught from books that many couldn't read-and he proposed a solution, moving students to books that they could. Another solution, one he apparently didn't entertain, was that teachers could adjust their instruction in particular ways to facilitate students' interactions with these hard-to-read books. As a recent study found-this one with high school students-most students who were asked to read grade-level materials were able to learn more than those placed in the easier books. ²⁵

Basically, what this research reveals is that limiting students to texts they can already read well reduces their opportunity to learn-by limiting their exposure to sophisticated vocabulary, rich content, and complex language. With knowledge of the research on effective reading instruction, skilled teachers can facilitate students' productive interactions with harder text.

But what has happened since states started requiring that students be taught to read more challenging text?

In 2010, the majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards. These standards, for the first time ever, set text levels that students were supposed to be able to read by the time they reached particular grade levels. The levels were set high to enable students to reach levels of proficiency that would ensure later life success.

States may have thought they had accomplished something pretty big by adopting those standards, and likewise district administrators may have thought they had dealt successfully with the complex text requirements when they purchased new textbooks matched to these new requirements. However, according to national surveys, ²⁶ all that has happened is that teachers, seeing that more of their students are now struggling with these newer texts, have increasingly relied on the idea of instructional-level teaching, and more and more are placing students in below-grade texts for reading instruction.

A More Effective Approach

As a teacher, I always taught with leveled books and worked hard to match texts to students in the ways described here. However, as I've learned of the research, I've gone a very different way-except with beginning readers. I know of no studies with kindergartners or first-graders showing that they should be trying to read particularly demanding texts (in contrast, there is a benefit to teachers reading aloud demanding texts to build young children's knowledge and vocabulary).

I've come to think of reading as the ability to make sense of the ideas presented in text, by taking advantage of the affordances and overcoming the barriers included in the text. Learning to read means becoming aware of these text features-and learning how to deal with them. Instructional-level texts are usually too easy to provide students with the opportunities to confront text features that they cannot already manage.

Affordances or barriers-and these are basically the same things-are features that authors build into their texts to facilitate communication. A particular text feature serves as an affordance if it does that, and-for some readers-it may serve as a barrier to understanding. For example, an author might aim for clarity and accuracy through apt diction, and for readers who know the meanings of the words so chosen, this can be a powerful text affordance. But for readers with more limited vocabularies? That potential affordance may become an unfortunate barrier for them.

It's not, however, as simple an equation as instructional-level theory makes out. It is not that some students have better vocabularies, so we should let them work with the relatively difficult books (the ones with the rich content and complex language), and that the other students-those who know fewer words-should be segregated into easier and more limited texts. That approach can have some unfortunate implications for students who are minorities and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. ²⁷

What if, instead of segregating them into what some students call the "stupid books," we placed them in books with demanding vocabulary and taught dictionary skills, use of context, and morphology? What if we taught them when it was essential to figure out an unknown word meaning and when they might be able to soldier on successfully without doing that?

And, of course, vocabulary is just one of many such text features. Studies have long shown that teaching students how to disentangle the grammar of some sentences, ²⁸ how to take advantage of the cohesive links across a passage, ²⁹ and how to identify and use a text's organizational structure ³⁰ all can improve reading comprehension. Teaching students to negotiate these features of a text only makes sense if students are to be confronted by challenging texts, and none of them have value for students reading, what for them, are easy books.

If we are serious about raising reading achievement, we must think hard about whether it makes sense to continue teaching students to read books they can already understand so well. These easier books make learning unnecessary and, without adequate challenge, may even drain the fun out of learning. That doesn't mean that every selection used for reading instruction must significantly challenge students, only that grade-level texts should be part of the instructional mix.

Instead of a steady diet of instructional-level texts, students should be reading a range of texts in their classrooms. Some proponents of leveled reading claim they too support this idea, but they propose that instructional-level texts should be the focus of small-group teaching. I recommend just the opposite, having students reading really demanding texts when the teacher is close by and ready to help, and less demanding ones when on their own or when a teacher just isn't going to be available.

But this is not just an avenue to higher achievement (though research suggests that it could be), it is also an issue of equity. If fourth-graders are taught from a second-grade book, when will they have the opportunity to confront the language and ideas of fourth-grade books? This is a cruel math problem that tells students they are best served by books that don't match their interests, their curiosity, or their social aspirations. Leveled reading emphasizes students' current limitations, rather than increasing their possibilities, especially for the least advantaged of our students. We can do better.
Timothy Shanahan is a distinguished professor emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the founding director of its Center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for Chicago Public Schools. A past president of the International Literacy Association, he was the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel and a member of both the National Reading Panel and the English Language Arts Work Team for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. He writes about education at www.shanahanonliteracy.com.
Endnotes

1. S. Schwartz, "The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by Science," Education Week, December 3, 2019.
2. D. Griffith and A. Duffet, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and J. Kaufman et al., Changes in What Teachers Know and Can Do in the Common Core Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
3. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Results from the 2019 Mathematics and Reading Assessments (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).
4. L. Zirbes, "Diagnostic Measurement as a Basis for Procedure," Elementary School Journal 18, no. 7 (1918): 505-522.
5. W. Theisen, "Provisions for Individual Differences in the Teaching of Reading," Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 2 (1920): 560-571.
6. G. Klare, The Measurement of Readability (Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1963).
7. California State Board of Education, English-Language Arts Framework for California Public Schools, Kindergarten through Grade 12 (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1987).
8. E. Hiebert, "Changing Readers, Changing Texts: Beginning Reading Texts from 1960 to 2019," Journal of Education 195, no. 3 (2015): 1-13.
9. E. H. Hiebert and C. W. Fisher, "The Critical Word Factor in Texts for Beginning Readers," Journal of Educational Research 101, no. 1 (2007): 3-11.
10. P. Pearson, "The Reading Wars," Educational Policy 18, no. 1 (2004): 216-252.
11. A. Stenner et al., "How Accurate Are Lexile Text Measures?," Journal of Applied Measurement 7, no. 3 (2006): 307-322.
12. P. Pearson and E. Hiebert, "The State of the Field: Qualitative Analyses of Text Complexity," Elementary School Journal 115, no. 2 (1991): 161-183.
13. B. Peterson, "Selecting Books for Beginning Readers: Children's Literature Suitable for Young Readers," in Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery, ed. D. DeFord, C. Lyons, and G. Pinnel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 119-147.
14. I. Fountas and G. Pinnell, "Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality," Reading Teacher 66, no. 4 (2012): 268-284.
15. J. Hoffman et al., "Text Leveling and Little Books in First-Grade Reading," Journal of Literacy Research 33 (2001): 507-528; and P. Hatcher, "Predictors of Reading Recovery Book Levels," Journal of Research in Reading 23 (2000): 67-77.
16. Fountas and Pinnell, "Guided Reading."
17. E. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction (New York: American Book, 1946).
18. P. Killgallon, "A Study of Relationships among Certain Pupil Adjustments in Language Situations" (unpublished PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1942).
19. H. Beldin, "Informal Reading Testing: Historical Review and Review of the Research," in Reading Difficulties: Diagnosis, Corrections, and Remediation, ed. W. Durr (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1970), 67-84.
20. W. Powell, "Reappraising the Criteria for Interpreting Informal Reading inventories," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Reading Association, Boston, MA, 1968.
21. A. Morgan, B. Wilcox, and J. Eldredge, "Effect of Difficulty Levels on Second-Grade Delayed Readers Using Dyad Reading," Journal of Educational Research 94, no. 2 (2000): 113-119.
22. L. Brown et al., "The Effects of Dyad Reading and Text Difficulty on Third-Graders' Reading Achievement," Journal of Educational Research 111, no. 5 (2017): 541-553.
23. M. Kuhn et al., "Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers," Journal of Literacy Research 38, no. 4 (2006): 357-387.
24. R. O'Connor, H. Swanson, and C. Geraghty, "Improvement in Reading Rate Under Independent and Difficult Text Levels: Influences on Word and Comprehension Skills," Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (2010): 1-19.
25. S. Lupo et al., "An Exploration of Text Difficulty and Knowledge Support on Adolescents' Comprehension," Reading Research Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2019): 457-479.
26. D. Griffith and A. Duffett, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and V. Opfer, J. Kaufman, and L. Thompson, Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy: Findings from the American Teacher Panel (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
27. A. Sørenson and M. Hallinan, "Effects of Ability Grouping on Growth in Academic Achievement," American Educational Research Journal 23, no. 4 (1986): 519-542.
28. V. Mih and C. Mih, "Reducing Children's Reading Comprehension Difficulties through a Training for Enhancing Sentence Organization Skills," Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2012): 387-401.
29. J. Irwin, "Linguistic Cohesion and the Developing Reader/Writer," Topics in Language Disorders 8, no. 3 (1988): 14-23.
30. K. Wijekumar, B. Meyer, and P. Lei, "Web-Based Text Structure Strategy Instruction Improves Seventh Graders' Content Area Reading Comprehension," Journal of Educational Psychology 109, no. 6 (2017): 741-760.

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations.

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Anderson, R.C., & Freebody, P. (1981). Vocabulary knowledge. In J.T. Guthrie (Ed.), Comprehension and teaching: Research reviews (pp. 77-117). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Anderson, R.C., & Freebody, P. (1983). Reading comprehension and the assessment and acquisition of word knowledge. In B. Hutson (Ed.), Advances in reading/language research (pp. 231-256). Greenwich, CT: JAI.

Anderson, R.C., & Freebody, P. (1985). Vocabulary knowledge. In H. Singer & R.B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (3rd ed., pp. 343-371). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: Guilford.

Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G., & Omanson, R.C. (1987). The effects and uses of diverse vocabulary instructional techniques. In M.G. McKeown & M.E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 147-163). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Blachowicz, C.L.Z., & Fisher, P.J. (2006). Teaching vocabulary in all classrooms (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Bravo, M.A., & Cervetti, G.N. (2008). Teaching vocabulary through text and experience in content areas. In A.E. Farstrup & S.J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about vocabulary instruction (pp. 130-149). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Bravo, M.A., Cervetti, G.N., Hiebert, E.H., & Pearson, P.D. (2008). From passive to active control of science vocabulary (56th yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 122-135). Chicago: National Reading Conference.

Calfee, R.C., & Drum, P. (1986). Research on teaching reading. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 804-849). New York: Macmillan.

Cronbach, L.J. (1942). Measuring knowledge of precise word meaning. The Journal of Educational Research, 36(7), 528-534.

Dale, E. (1965). Vocabulary measurement: Techniques and major findings. Elementary English, 42(8), 895-901.

Johnson, D.D., Moe, A.J., & Baumann, J.F. (1983). The Ginn word book for teachers: A basic lexicon. Boston: Ginn.

Johnson, D.D., & Pearson, P.D. (1984). Teaching reading vocabulary. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Nagy, W.E., & Scott, J.A. (2000). Vocabulary Processing. In M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 269-274). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

National Assessment Governing Board. (2009). Reading framework for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Retrieved December 29, 2009, from www.nagb.org/publications/frameworks/reading09.pdf

National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. (2007). National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition Report: NCELA frequently asked questions. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved October 2, 2007, from www.ncela.gwu.edu/faqs

National Institute of Child Health and Human, Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Paris, S.G. (2005). Reinterpreting the development of reading skills. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(2), 184-202. doi:10.1598/RRQ.40.2.3

Qian, D.D. (2002). Investigating the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and academic reading performance: An assessment perspective. Language Learning, 52(3), 513-536. doi:10.1111/1467-9922.00193

Read, J. (2000). Assessing vocabulary. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Stahl, K.A.D. (2008). The effects of three instructional methods on the reading comprehension and content acquisition of novice readers. Journal of Literacy Research, 40(3), 359-393. doi:10.1080/10862960802520594

Stahl, S.A., & Nagy, W.E. (2006). Teaching word meanings. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Stahl, S.A., & Stahl, K.A.D. (2004). Word wizards all! Teaching word meanings in preschool and primary education. In J.F. Baumann & E.J. Kame'enui (Eds.), Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice (pp. 59-78). New York: Guilford.

Wesche, M., & Paribakht, T.S. (1996). Assessing second language vocabulary knowledge: Depth versus breadth. Canadian Modern Language Review, 53(1), 13-40.

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Classroom Vocabulary Assessment for Content Areas

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What are some ways that we can gauge vocabulary development in the content areas? In this article, the authors explain how the intricacies of word knowledge make assessment difficult, particularly with content area vocabulary. They suggest ways to improve assessments that more precisely track students' vocabulary growth across the curriculum, including English language learners.

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This post is published with permission from , the Core Knowledge Foundation's publishing partner for the Core Knowledge Language Arts® program. This post, subtitled "How two Wisconsin researchers discovered that the comprehension gap is a knowledge gap," examines an experiment that yielded interesting, and perhaps unexpected, results.

Posted by Core Knowledge Foundation

Category: Curriculum

In Norway, Wisconsin, as in much of the state, cold winters are a way of life. People allow extra time to bundle up and then waddle through town like Michelin men edged with fur. For the few months that grass is visible, it is tightly shorn. Lake Michigan, 20 miles to the east, makes the climate a little milder, so that the first freeze comes with the end of the baseball season, and the last freeze with the start of the next. Houses appear recently painted, and the low-slung school buildings sprawl as if the architect was unsure how to fill such a generous plot of land.

In one of those buildings in 1987, two young researchers from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, ran an experiment elegant in its simplicity but profound in its implications. They took over an empty classroom and created an 18 by 20-inch replica of a baseball field furnished with four-inch wooden figures. Over several days, they invited 64 students to enter the room one by one. Leslie silently handed each student the same story narrating half an inning of a made-up baseball game. They were asked to read the story and use the model to reenact the action. The passage began in the middle of the action:

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars' left-fielder.

All day long, Recht, dark-haired and ruddy, took copious notes, while Leslie, fair with eyes that expect you to try your best, ran through the task with a student. One 12 year old after another studied the passage and acted out the play:

The ball is returned to Claresen. He gets the sign and winds up, and throws a slider that Whitcomb hits between Manfred and Roberts for a hit.

Each student read carefully, laboring over every line, straining to capture each detail of the action.

Dulaney comes in and picks up the ball. Johnson has scored, and Churniak is heading for third. Here comes the throw and Churniak is out. Churniak argues but to no avail.

Every day, four-inch figures were pushed and pulled across the field, each motion representing the turning of the wheels in students' brains as they worked through the play. Eventually, Recht gave each student a quiz designed to assess his or her baseball knowledge, while Leslie reset the pieces and ushered in the next kid.

It took two full weeks to work through the 64 students and another month to compile their scores and analyze the results before they were able to pinpoint who did best at correctly reconstructing the story. Was it:

Strong readers;

Kids with good knowledge of baseball;

It made no difference?

Pause for a moment to make your prediction before reading further.

To their surprise, Recht and Leslie found that reading ability had little impact on how well kids understood the story. But knowledge of baseball did. In fact, those who were weaker readers did as well as strong readers if they had knowledge of baseball.

"Prior knowledge creates a scaffolding for information," explains Recht. "For poor readers, the scaffolding allows them to compensate for their generally inefficient recognition of important ideas."* If those same kids were taking a state test, the SAT or any other standard test of comprehension, and the passage just happened to be about baseball, they would outperform everyone else. But if they encountered a passage on a topic they knew little about, they would fare much worse.

High-stakes tests don't contain passages on baseball precisely because that would be unfair to kids who don't follow the sport. But they do contain passages on the founding documents of the United States, animal ecology, and space exploration. (In [another article in this issue](/blog/article/the-10-knowledge-domains-that-will-give-your-students-an-advantage-on-parc c), we present analysis of over 100 PARCC and SBAC passages, showing the prior knowledge that would give students an advantage.) Beyond test taking, others have identified the prior knowledge necessary to succeed in college and life. Beyond school, writers of newspaper articles, magazine pieces and books all make assumptions about basic knowledge shared by readers.

What Recht and Leslie showed was that knowledge counts much more than we think in understanding text. They point out that an emphasis on teaching reading strategies-such as finding the main idea and summarization-has become very prevalent in US classrooms based on evidence that they help weak readers. But practicing these strategies over and over has diminishing returns-and comes at the cost of a crucial missed opportunity; building knowledge is at least as important.

It is hard to find the "main idea" of a piece of writing if you aren't really understanding any of the ideas. Is a kangaroo rat large like a kangaroo or small like a rat? How does a rainforest feel when you are wearing a wool uniform like the English schoolboys did in Lord of the Flies? Prior knowledge can transform a poor reader into a capable one and a poor writer into a fascinating one.

*Recht and Leslie published their research in Recht, D.R. and Leslie, L., 1988. Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), p.16.

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The Baseball Experiment - Core Knowledge Foundation

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In 1987, two young researchers from Marquette University ran an experiment. Their results showed that even as many Language Arts programs emphasize "reading strategies," knowledge counts much more than you might think when it comes to understanding text.

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2023 Revised DCI Vertical Alignment Science K-8

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Elementary School Lessons utilize local phenomenon and are organized by grade level. By organizing instruction around local phenomenon, students are provided with a reason to learn shifting the focus from learning about a disconnected topic to figuring out why or how something happens. To access

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2nd Grade GRC -bdm- Science Lessons- Life, Physica

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Instructional Leadership for Science Practices

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This tool is a continuum for each practice that shows how students' performance can progress over time. For each science practice, we focused on one or two elements, which can be challenging for students and are productive levers for shifting classroom culture. A teacher can use the continuum to assess students' abilities to engage in the practices and to inform future instruction. The continuum can be used across multiple time points across the year to assess student growth and can be paired with instructional strategies to address specific student challenges.

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This tool is a continuum for each practice that shows how students' performance can progress over time. For each science practice, we focused on one or two elements, which can be challenging for...

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America's reading comprehension crisis.

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achievethecore.org's digital tools and resources for teachers have been made possible by contributions from teachers across the country as well as through generous support from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and the GE Foundation.

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We are now posting open education resources for professional development! Our STEM Teaching Tools have been used to support extended professional development (PD) sessions. We are now posting open educational resource (OER) versions of those PD sessions. They include all of the resources that PD fac…

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KDE - Science Standards Implementation Guidance Document

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List of Resources in Social Studies.docx

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The Special Collections Research Center preserves materials documenting the social, cultural, economic, and political history of Kentucky. The SCRC is home to UK Libraries' collection of rare books, Kentuckiana, the Archives, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, the King Library Press, the Bert T. Combs Appalachian Collection, the John G.

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Copy of Hexagonal Thinking Review TEMPLATE (shared)

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Hexagon Template for Hexagonal Thinkinig