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"New Research on Text Complexity"- National Governors Association

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"New Research on Text Complexity"- National Governors Association

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Please add your name and contact information if you are comfortable!

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Natalie Wexler, education journalist and author of "The Knowledge Gap," hosts the inaugural series of our new podcast, Reading Comprehension Revisited.

In six short (~30-minute) episodes, Natalie tackles crucial questions such as, why do students from low-income backgrounds typically score lower on reading tests? Why do improvements in the early grades fade out as students advance to higher levels? And most significantly, why haven't substantial investments in education reform delivered expected results?

The answer lies in a longstanding misunderstanding about reading comprehension itself, and how students learn to make meaning from texts. Over six episodes, you'll learn what research tells us about how children really learn to read, and you'll hear from educators from around the country as they share their experiences of embedding knowledge-building into their literacy instruction, and the powerful effects this change has had on their students.
Episode 1: "Kids were bored to death"
June 28, 2023 - Despite substantial investments in education reform, the US remains in the grip of a decades-long reading crisis. But why? With the help of teachers and researchers, host Natalie Wexler introduces the urgent need to revisit our approach to reading comprehension.
Episode 2: "A simple way of looking at a complex problem"
June 28, 2023 - Thanks to tireless efforts by researchers, advocates, and educators, the importance of systematically teaching decoding is finally being recognized. But, as you'll hear, there's far more to reading than decoding, and more we need to do to help our kids become truly literate.
Episode 3: "That cloud looks like an anvil"
July 5, 2023 - Abby Boruff, Deloris Fowler, and Kyair Butts teach different ages and subjects, in different parts of the country. When their schools adopted knowledge-building curricula they were skeptical, but the dramatic results they saw in their classrooms helped change their minds.
Episode 4: "Now they had something to write about"
July 12, 2023 - It's hard to read about a topic you don't have knowledge about, but it's virtually impossible to write about it. By having students write about content they're learning about, knowledge-building curricula boost both writing ability and learning in general.
Episode 5: "Everything was in silos"
July 19, 2023 - To become fully literate, many students need a curriculum that builds knowledge in a logical, coherent way across grade levels, and only a leader can put that kind of system in place. Meet Brent Conway and Dr. LaTonya Goffney, two leaders who did exactly that.
Episode 6: "Think what a better society we'll have"
July 26, 2023 - American education has a number of serious problems - and our failure to start building kids' knowledge early is a fundamental one. But there are ways to ensure that the growing trend toward knowledge-building curriculum takes root and spreads.

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Natalie Wexler, education journalist and author of "The Knowledge Gap," hosts the inaugural series of our new podcast, Reading Comprehension Revisited. In six short (~30-minute) episodes, Natalie tackles crucial questions such as, why do students from low-income backgrounds typically score lower on reading tests?

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Common Core Standards Qualitative Features of Text Complexity Explained

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Common Core Standards Qualitative Features of Text Complexity Explained

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ckimura@sas.edu.sg
@msclaudias_bento

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I would like to know how many texts do you use as a mentor text in a unit? For example, a content unit (science, history) and a writing unit.
Thank you!

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emily.ryan@asd.edu.qa
emily.dr@gmail.com

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Want to hear more about the importance of syntax and cohesion - thanks for sharing as sometimes naming something gives a "face" to what I don't know.

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Want to hear more about the importance of syntax and cohesion - thanks for sharing as sometimes naming something gives a "face" to what I don't know.

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Want to hear more about the how around Vocabulary instruction. What is best practice that "works"? Resources for that and maybe some videos to see it in action over a period of time.

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Want to hear more about the how around Vocabulary instruction. What is best practice that "works"? Resources for that and maybe some videos to see it in action over a period of time.

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Key Ah Ha: "Strategies are best taught in synergy with KB"

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Key Ah Ha: "Strategies are best taught in synergy with KB"

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Love the unit design for Background Knowledge as I can picture that in action

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Love the unit design for Background Knowledge as I can picture that in action

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It was very helpful to get some background on the evolution of these concepts and the research that supports this approach to text complexity. I will definitely be sharing key points with my teaching team!

I would love to come away with a toolbox of a few things I (and my colleagues) could try right away as we return to school next month. Since it is not realistic to re-write all our reading units immediately, what are some additional things we can do within our units to teach into text complexity rather than reading level? To build BK and vocabulary?

Thank you!

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laramccurdy2017@gmail.com

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Francoise.raoult@bcis.cn

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CCSS ELA Appendix A

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The Standards' Approach to Text Complexity

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The Standards' Approach to Text Complexity

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This appendix provides research demonstrating that while the complexity of reading demands for college and careers have risen over the past 50 years, the complexity of texts students are exposed to has decreased.

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CCSS ELA/Literacy Appendix A: Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards & Glossary of Key Terms

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This appendix provides research demonstrating that while the complexity of reading demands for college and careers have risen over the past 50 years, the complexity of texts students are exposed to has decreased.

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Planning Template
Syntax Example Shared Reading Small Group 1
Syntax Example Shared Reading Small Group 2

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kalley@erinkentconsulting.com
@kalleyhoke

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Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension- Hugh Catts

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Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension- Hugh Catts

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It is February 2015, and I am at a national conference listening to a panel present the results of their research on improving reading comprehension. Several members of the panel, like myself and a few others in the room, are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. This $120 million program supported six interconnected research teams in their efforts to improve reading achievement in the United States. ¹ Educators and policymakers had for some time been concerned about the performance of American children on tests of reading achievement. Over the last 20 years, only about a third of students have scored at the proficient level on the reading subtest of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). ² This assessment is administered biennially to a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students (and every four years to 12th-graders) from across the nation. Somewhat better, though still troubling, levels of performance have also been reported on state-based reading tests, administered annually starting in third grade. The Reading for Understanding Initiative was intended to jump-start instruction in reading comprehension and significantly improve reading achievement on state and national assessments. In fact, it was described by program officials as the "moonshot" for reading comprehension.

Unfortunately, the preliminary results that the panel presented fell short of these expectations. The reported studies found that students receiving a variety of comprehension interventions made gains, compared with control groups, on assessments closely tied to the interventions-but they showed limited or no significant gains on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Needless to say, conference attendees were surprised and discouraged by these results.

Sitting in the back of the room, I clearly remember not being particularly alarmed by what the panel reported. As part of my work on the Reading for Understanding Initiative and earlier related projects, I had spent many hours thinking, studying, and talking with teachers and colleagues about reading comprehension. Through these efforts, I had come to recognize that the field's general approach to reading comprehension was shortsighted. We were treating reading comprehension as if it were a single construct that could be measured with one or more general reading tests and improved with a short-term intervention. At a deeper conceptual level, most researchers (including those funded by the Reading for Understanding Initiative) recognized that reading comprehension was multidimensional, but it had been common practice in education and research for some time to study, assess, and provide instruction as if comprehension were a skill, rather like swimming. If we teach someone to swim, they can soon transfer that skill to any body of water, whether it be a pool, lake, or ocean. But reading comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts. It is one of the most complex activities that we engage in on a regular basis, and our ability to comprehend is dependent upon a wide range of knowledge and skills.

The Comprehension as Skill Myth

How have we come to think of comprehension as a skill? I believe a major reason this has occurred is because we have talked and written about comprehension in the context of related skill-like abilities. Discussions about reading often include the topics of phonics, fluency, and related skills, such as phonemic awareness, together with comprehension. As an example, take the work of the National Reading Panel. ³ This panel of reading experts was convened by Congress to assess the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching reading. They examined a wide range of instructional approaches related to comprehension, but in overviews of their work, comprehension has been reduced to one of the "Big Five," along with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary. As such, it is depicted alongside these skills as one of the "pillars" of reading. In another common graphic, the word comprehension is displayed within a box similar in design (actually smaller) to boxes for other skill-like components of reading. Whereas such a consideration and depiction are thought to form a useful heuristic, it can give the false impression that comprehension is comparable to these skills in terms of its complexity and the way it is best taught and measured.

Furthermore, widely used approaches to teaching reading comprehension reinforce this view. ⁴ Comprehension has typically been taught through the use of strategies such as "find the main idea," "make a prediction," or "monitor your comprehension." These strategies are taught and practiced in order to gain automaticity, much like what is done with other skill-like behaviors. This, in turn, can lead us to believe that comprehension can be thought of in a similar manner to these other skills.

A More Accurate and Complex Model

Despite this common view about comprehension, several lines of enquiry have recognized the true complexity of reading comprehension for some time. Nearly 20 years ago, this complexity was captured by the RAND Reading Study Group. ⁵ This federally funded group was charged with developing a research agenda to address pressing issues in literacy. As part of their 2002 report, they conceptualized reading comprehension as a combination of factors within three different categories: the reader, the text, and the activity of reading.

The reader brings a set of cognitive abilities (such as attention, memory, and reasoning), language knowledge and skills, motivations and interests, and background knowledge to the task of reading. Readers vary considerably in these factors, and this variability impacts their comprehension. Considerable research attention has been focused on reader variables, and their impact on comprehension is well documented.

The text includes such elements as genre, topic, and complexity. Students encounter texts with different genres-such as narrative, descriptive, expository, or persuasive-and these texts vary in their subject matter and level of complexity. Although not emphasized in the RAND report from 2002, texts also now vary in their form. They may be in a paper or digital form, and the latter can be displayed on a variety of devices, such as a phone, tablet, or computer. Each of these forms imposes its own set of constraints and challenges on comprehension. The notion of multiple texts can also be added to this category to account for the fact that skilled readers often rely on more than one text for comprehension.

The activity refers to the task or purpose of reading. It is often argued that the purpose of reading is comprehension. But we actually seek to comprehend for a specific reason, be it to prepare for a test, evaluate the strengths of an argument, learn the rules of a game, or enjoy a magazine article or book. Each purpose brings unique knowledge and skills that must be acquired to be successful.

Importantly, the RAND Reading Study Group viewed these various elements interacting within a sociocultural context that involves factors such as where the reading occurs (e.g., school or home), how much support there is (e.g., individual, teacher- or caregiver-led, or group activity), and what cultural value is placed on reading by students' families, peers, racial and ethnic groups, and other groups that are central to the students' identities.

Taken together, it is easy to see how any one individual may have multiple levels of comprehension ability depending upon what they are reading and why they are reading it. As a result, comprehension cannot be reduced to a single notion because it is not a single ability.

The Role of Knowledge

Chief among the factors influencing reading comprehension is background knowledge. Research clearly shows that how much readers understand about the text's topic before they read it is a major factor in how much they understand while and after they read it. ⁶ Unfortunately, much of the efforts directed toward improving reading comprehension have neglected building background knowledge. (As discussed later, there are widely used strategies for "activating" background knowledge, but they do not necessarily develop new knowledge.) It was this neglect that first alerted me to the problems with the way we were thinking about reading comprehension.

In my graduate training, many years ago, I was introduced to the role of knowledge in reading comprehension. At that time, schema theory was a popular topic in research on human cognition and learning. A schema is an organized unit of knowledge that forms the foundation for many activities involving human thought. Richard Anderson, a professor of educational psychology, brought the notion of a schema to education and argued for its critical role in reading comprehension as well as learning in general. ⁷ He was among the first to convey to me the importance of teaching knowledge to improve comprehension.

In my psychology classes, I was introduced to a study that continues to be one of my favorites. The following passage, which was designed to be ambiguous, was read aloud to college students, and they were asked to recall as much as they could.

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. ⁸

Students given the topic of the passage beforehand quickly made sense of what they heard and recalled many details. (Those students were told, "The paragraph you will hear will be about washing clothes.") But those who heard the same passage without the topic were confused and recalled little. Of particular interest, a third group of students was given the topic after they heard the passage, but they too were confused and recalled little. Of course, it was not simply the topic but rather the knowledge associated with it that allowed the students to make sense of what they had heard-but only if this knowledge was available from the start.

It was studies like this, including similar ones involving reading rather than listening, that early on clearly demonstrated for me the importance of knowledge for comprehension. But somewhere along the line, educators and researchers-myself included-got distracted and failed to pay attention to its importance. It is not exactly clear how this happened. Perhaps it was a shift in focus to bottom-up models of reading that argued that meaning was contained within the text and that the reader's job was to extract it. Or maybe it was just that knowledge took too much time to teach, and it made more sense to focus on skills that could be taught quickly and applied across topics. Also, considering comprehension alongside skill-like aspects of reading probably distracted us from the role of knowledge.

But whatever the reason, knowledge has come back to the forefront in discussions of reading comprehension. Proponents such as E. D. Hirsch Jr., Daniel T. Willingham, and Natalie Wexler have written extensively about the role of knowledge in comprehension.* Their work and that of others ⁹ has begun to have an influence on research in reading comprehension, but change has been slow. Some of the projects in the Reading for Understanding Initiative did have knowledge as a central component, but the other projects paid only limited attention to knowledge in instruction and/or assessment. Limited attention also plagued other large-scale projects, such as those within the Striving Readers program. This program funded by the US Department of Education involved a set of 17 studies designed to improve reading comprehension in middle and high school students. ¹⁰ While materials did address different topics, there was no direct effort to build knowledge as part of the intervention or assessment. Again, it is not surprising that these studies only demonstrated small effects at best on improving reading comprehension.

What Knowledge Does for Comprehension

Why is knowledge so critical for comprehension? To begin with, it provides a framework for organizing incoming information and guides us as we read through a text. We better understand what the topic is and have expectations about where a passage may be going. By doing so, knowledge keeps us on track and prevents us from going down "blind alleys" in our understanding. This framework also gives us a place to anchor new information in memory and associate it with past knowledge. We use these building blocks of the new and the old to construct an initial understanding of what we are reading and then continuously revise and add to it as we move through a text. It is this integration of the new information in the text with what we already know that brings meaning to what we read.

Background knowledge also allows us to make inferences and fill in information that is not explicitly provided. Authors rarely tell us all we need to know in order to understand a text, so we need to fill in some of the details with our background knowledge. Knowledge also enables us to more easily recognize which of the multiple meanings of a word is appropriate for the context. For example, when reading a passage about baseball, knowing that the word pitcher refers to a person rather than an object could be critical for comprehension.

Knowledge is also essential for thinking. But in certain contexts these days, it is seen as secondary to thinking. Critical thinking has become the rage in education. All too often, teachers are urged to engage students in thinking deeply and critically about what they read as if these skills were independent of the topic; meanwhile, background knowledge is downplayed as if the specific information about a topic could be looked up on the internet when necessary. ¹¹ But it is the specific information that gives students something to think critically about-and our minds are surprisingly limited in how much new information they can take in at one time. Knowledge must accumulate over time to ensure a level of depth that allows for a critical analysis of the subject matter. We can't think logically about different approaches to government without knowing a lot about different forms of government. So, in this sense, knowledge is the most critical component of critical thinking.

Knowledge also allows us to make the most use of our working memory, where much of thinking takes place. There are limitations on how much information we can hold and think about simultaneously in working memory, and this amount is heavily influenced by knowledge. Knowledge coming from long-term memory places a much smaller burden on working memory than new knowledge coming from a text (or a speaker); it also leaves us with more capacity in working memory to think about things in novel ways. As a simple example, it is easier to remember the letter sequences USA, FBI, and NBC than PDQ, RJB, and FVO. When reading, the more information related to the topic we already have stored in long-term memory, the more deeply we can think about that topic-even as we read a passage that offers new information.

Finally, the relationship between knowledge and reading comprehension is reciprocal in nature. Not only does knowledge improve comprehension, but comprehension allows the reader to build new knowledge. Creating a coherent understanding of what one reads modifies the background knowledge that is available for subsequent reading comprehension either later in the same text or in future reading of related texts. ¹²

Implications for Instruction

It should be evident from my comments that improving reading comprehension is a complex process that requires multiple levels of instruction and practice. Clearly, building background knowledge that is both deep and broad is needed to lay the foundation for comprehension and for further knowledge acquisition. However, students also need high-quality reading instruction involving decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies in order to best use their knowledge in different reading contexts and for different purposes.

For many years, the primary way knowledge has been addressed in the context of reading has been through activating background knowledge using strategies like prereading discussions, concept maps, and anticipation guides. These strategies can be effective-but they only work when the appropriate knowledge is available. Often, children will not have the requisite knowledge, or their knowledge will be impoverished or inaccurate. If inaccurate, this activation can actually be detrimental to comprehension.

Whereas knowledge activation has been widely viewed as a component of reading instruction, building knowledge often has not. In fact, instruction devoted to content knowledge has actually been replaced by other aspects of reading instruction. In most elementary schools, social studies and science instruction has been supplanted by English language arts (ELA) instruction. Surveys have shown that, on average, children in grades 1-4 receive only 2.3 hours of science instruction per week, whereas four times that amount is spent on ELA instruction teaching word-reading skills, comprehension strategies, and vocabulary. ¹³ The thinking has been that if we want children to improve their reading comprehension, we have to work on reading skills to achieve fluency before we can use reading to build knowledge. However, this false dichotomy between learning to read and reading to learn has not led to better reading achievement.

Recently, educators have begun to rethink reading instruction and consider how to better integrate knowledge acquisition with literacy in ELA instruction. ¹⁴ In these more integrated approaches, students build knowledge at the same time they are learning reading-related skills. This involves a concentrated effort to build rich and connected ideas about social studies, science, and other subjects during ELA lessons. Such instruction does not necessarily replace the science and social studies instruction that may be taking place at other times but rather supplements it. As with other content instruction, reading materials in an integrated ELA program are selected to build knowledge. Instead of reading, for example, about volcanoes one day and Rosa Parks the next, which has often been the case in ELA instruction, reading materials are arranged by topic in a logical and sequential manner and form an integrated, content-rich curriculum. In this way, knowledge is acquired and accumulated over time.

Such content-rich, connected instruction can be especially engaging and can draw children's interests to literacy and learning. Student engagement and learning can be further fostered by culturally responsive instruction. One example is a program called Readiness through Integrative Science and Engineering. ¹⁵ This program takes a home-to-school approach to connect new knowledge with culturally relevant knowledge concerning the people, places, and objects that students interact with on a daily basis. By understanding, appreciating, and connecting with this knowledge, learning can be especially enhanced for all children.

In an integrated literacy and knowledge-building curriculum, there should be a strong focus on teaching fundamental reading skills. Depending on the grade and specific skills taught, instruction in decoding, spelling, and fluency could comprise its own unit or be blended with discussion and activities designed to acquire and build content-area knowledge. Vocabulary, an important focus of ELA instruction, can be taught especially well within a content-rich, integrated curriculum. Novel words related to the content are excellent targets for instruction. These words are often repeated multiple times in a text, and their meanings are well supported by the context in which they occur. In addition, once learned, they become part of the knowledge base of the topic. General-purpose academic words, or what are sometimes referred to as Tier 2 words, also are learned more easily in a rich context. When these words are supported by content knowledge, the reader can use this knowledge to more easily infer their meaning. Also, a rich context can prove particularly helpful in learning words with multiple meanings, such as "bright" or "palm." ¹⁶

Content-rich materials are also excellent contexts in which to learn more about academic language. Written language is characterized by more complex grammar than spoken language, and students can benefit from explicit instruction in how this grammar works. Specifically, science texts tend to privilege nouns for compacting information, developing logical reasoning, and achieving precision. ¹⁷ For example, consider this text: "Asthma is a disorder in which the respiratory passages narrow significantly as a result of an allergen. This narrowing...." Here the author creates an abstract noun (i.e., "this narrowing") to represent the entire previous clause. Recognizing the referent of this abstract noun is critical to comprehension and, in cases like this, could benefit from explicit instruction. In other academic texts, students will be confronted with complex and elaborated noun phrases, rather than reduced ones, as well as challenging noun, adverbial, and adjectival clauses. For example, social studies texts use "noun clauses (e.g., 'Jefferson's next argument was that King George III had violated the colonists' rights by passing unfair laws and interfering with colonial governments'), adverbial clauses (e.g., 'Even before Washington reached Boston, the Patriots took action'), and adjectival clauses (e.g., 'He was influenced by the Enlightenment idea of the social contract, which states that governments and rulers must protect the rights of citizens') to pack a large amount of information." ¹⁸ Given this complexity, explicit instruction in how to unpack academic grammar could prove helpful to students in understanding informational texts.

Integrated approaches also can incorporate many of the same comprehension strategies employed in traditional ELA instruction. Some of these strategies, like inferencing and paraphrasing, are rather general and can be explicitly taught and used across various contexts. However, within an integrated approach, some strategies are best selected and taught based on their relevance to what is being read and for what purpose. The nature of texts and purposes for reading vary across subject matters, and thus, the strategies that may be most advantageous will vary as well.

Some of these strategies will be the common ones (e.g., mental imagery) identified by the National Reading Panel. Others will be more text- and task-specific metacognitive approaches to assist comprehension. For example, during a social studies lesson, students may be presented with an explanation or argument and asked to evaluate its validity. In such a case, students would benefit from explicit instruction and practice on how to identify a claim and judge the relevance, sufficiency, and accuracy of the evidence provided. Alternatively, science texts often provide a description of some object, animal, or process, and students are often tested on what they have learned from their reading. For such a task, students may benefit from being taught how to use a graphic organizer to summarize and categorize the information within different organizational structures. Students will also benefit from recognizing that a science text (from a trustworthy source) is an authoritative account and is different from texts in which the author's perspective is central, such as a poem or a historical figure's diary entry. This more nuanced approach to strategies becomes ever more important as students move through the grades and the comprehension skills needed are increasingly determined by the characteristics of the text and the activities carried out within the different disciplines. Nevertheless, knowledge of how disciplinary texts work, or what is called disciplinary literacy, can and should be part of instruction in the elementary grades. ¹⁹

There are now quite a few integrated, content-rich curricula being used across the country. Some of these programs are commercially available through curriculum publishers, such as Core Knowledge Language Arts and Wit & Wisdom, whereas others have been developed by researchers, such as Model of Reading Engagement. ²⁰ Some of these programs have been developed specifically to be used as part of ELA instruction. Others are truly integrated across the curriculum and operate instead of or in addition to ELA materials. There is also quite a bit of variability in the scope of literacy instruction within these programs. Nevertheless, a recent meta-analysis showed that when compared with traditional programs in which literacy and content instruction were provided separately, integrated, content-rich programs resulted in students scoring significantly better on vocabulary and comprehension (including on standardized measures of comprehension). Not surprisingly, significant gains were also made in the content taught. ²¹

Implications for Assessment

The multidimensional nature of reading comprehension presents a significant challenge for assessment. Because of the numerous factors in play, a reader's comprehension ability is more fluid than often thought. In other words, any one individual will have different levels of ability depending on what is read and for what purpose.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this variability and its impact on assessment comes from a study that included scores from 995 children who were administered four different standardized measures of reading comprehension. ²² The researchers found that the median correlation between the different tests was only .54, which was surprisingly low given that the tests purported to measure the same thing. In another analysis of the data, they identified children scoring in the lowest 10th percentile on each of the measures and compared the overlap of these groups across measures. Their results showed that, on average, only 43 percent of the children identified by one test as poor readers were also identified as poor readers on another test. In other words, the odds of any two tests diagnosing the same student as having a comprehension deficit were less than half. Further analyses showed that it was not just a problem of consistency at the lower end of the scale; there was just as much inconsistency in identifying children performing in the highest 10th percentile.

The inconsistency in the results of the different measures of reading comprehension was likely due in part to the poor reliability of these measures, something that is not uncommon for diagnostic measures of reading comprehension. On the other hand, the measures also differed in their formats, so that could have contributed to the variability. One measure employed a cloze task in which children read passages and filled in missing words. In the others, children read either passages or single sentences and then answered open-ended or multiple-choice questions. These formats are known to place different demands on reading-related processes, such as word reading, language ability, and working memory. ²³ Thus, children with different strengths and weaknesses in these processes would be expected to perform differently on the measures.

The content of the passages/sentences may also have added to the variability of the measures. That is, children were likely to have varied in their knowledge about the topics covered, and that could have influenced their performance. Such variability may be present not only across tests but also across passages within a test. For example, in the Reading for Understanding project that my colleagues and I carried out, students read four different passages from an informal reading inventory and answered open-ended questions. We observed considerable variability within students from one passage to another. It was not uncommon for a student to get nearly all the questions correct on one passage and most wrong on another. Whereas there may be several reasons for this variability, differences in background knowledge is a likely contributor.

Because of the variability due to passages, state- and national-level tests of reading use numerous passages that cover multiple topics. But, of course, this introduces the problem of these tests favoring students who have more knowledge about a broad range of topics than those with less knowledge. This has led E. D. Hirsch Jr. to argue that reading tests are actually knowledge tests in disguise. ²⁴

The fact that state and national reading tests are knowledge heavy introduces a further problem: performance on these tests will likely be more difficult to change in the short term, since knowledge acquisition is incremental in nature. Indeed, as I stated at the outset, American children's performance on NAEP has remained virtually unchanged for some time. This has been in spite of significant federal, state, and local efforts. For example, in North Carolina, the percentage of students failing to reach proficiency on state reading tests has remained largely unchanged, hovering above 50 percent, since 2013-14, when the state passed its K-3 Read to Achieve literacy act. ²⁵

Maybe the problem is not only the instructional practices teachers have been encouraged to use but also the way we are assessing comprehension. An alternative approach would be to teach children using an integrated literacy and content-rich curriculum and to test their ability to read and comprehend passages covered in that curriculum. In other words, offer a better match between instruction and assessment. Don't just test the skills and strategies that have been taught; test the specific content-area topics that have been taught. Such an approach would be fairer and more equitable for all involved. Teachers would have a clear idea of what content within which to imbed their literacy instruction. Students would have the opportunity to learn from content-rich curricula and be assessed based on what they learned in school (instead of what they may or may not have learned at home, over the summer, etc.). Also, because instruction would be better matched with assessment, there would be a greater opportunity for schools and districts to evaluate the progress they are making.

One approach that has attempted to better match instruction with assessment is being carried out within the guidelines of the Every Student Succeeds Act assessment pilot program. ²⁶ This program encourages local involvement in the development of the next generation of assessments. It allows states, with approval by the US Department of Education, to pilot new and innovative assessments in lieu of current state exams. Initially, this takes place in a small number of districts before moving on to statewide implementation. As of October 2021, five states have received approval to develop these assessments. Most notable, Louisiana has begun a multiyear process to offer a humanities assessment as an alternative to its English language arts and social studies assessments. ²⁷ The new humanities assessment draws from texts and topics that are included in the state's recommended curriculum. ²⁸ Thus, the content of the test is likely to be well matched with the instruction students receive.

A very limited pilot of this new assessment, LEAP 2025 Humanities, began in the 2018-19 school year, and then implementation was interrupted by the pandemic, ²⁹ so it will likely be several more years before researchers can evaluate the impact of this new approach. Of course, designing an assessment that is in keeping with current research on literacy development is just the first step. The extent to which the assessment will help enhance instructional practices depends on many related components, including meaningful professional development on how to use the results to inform teaching; time (appropriately allocated and compensated) for teachers to learn collaboratively as they adjust to the new assessment; genuine opportunities for all teachers to have a voice in providing feedback on the curriculum and assessment; and lower stakes tied to the assessment results such that teachers are not afraid to be innovative. In fact, one of the findings of the Reading for Understanding Initiative was that "a major roadblock to teacher uptake of new practices is the accountability infrastructure of reform movements. The more test scores matter, the less the likelihood that teachers will adopt novel teaching practices." ³⁰

Still, I am especially encouraged by Louisiana's efforts and am hopeful that other states and districts will also consider how to better align what is tested with what is taught. It is these types of programs, combined with integrated literacy and content-rich curricula, that I believe can better address comprehension. These programs move beyond characterizing comprehension as simply one of the "Big Five" and recognize its complexity and what it will take to help all children understand and learn from what they read. I look forward to attending future conferences where the results of these programs are presented.
Hugh W. Catts is a professor in the Florida State University School of Communication Science and Disorders and is affiliated with the Florida Center for Reading Research. The author of dozens of peer-reviewed articles and editor of several books, Catts has been engaged in research on language and literacy development for over four decades. Much of his work focuses on early identification and prevention of language-based reading disabilities and on reading comprehension assessment and intervention.
*For articles by Hirsch, Willingham, and Wexler on the importance of building knowledge, see the "Reading" section of American Educator's subject index. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. P. Pearson et al., eds., Reaping the Rewards of the Reading for Understanding Initiative (Washington, DC: National Academy of Education, 2020), naeducation.org/reaping-the-rewards-of-reading-for-understanding-initiative.
2. National Assessment of Educational Progress, "National Achievement-Level Results," Grade 4, Nation's Report Card, 2019, nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4.
3. National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child and Human Development, 2000).
4. D. T. Willingham and G. Lovette, "Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught," Teachers College Record (September 2014).
5. C. Snow, Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2002).
6. G. N. Cervetti and T. S. Wright, "The Role of Knowledge in Understanding and Learning from Text," in Handbook of Reading Research, ed. E. B. Moje et al. (Taylor and Francis Group, 2020).
7. R. Anderson, "Schema-Directed Processes in Language Comprehension," in Cognitive Psychology and Instruction, ed. A. Lesgold et al. (New York: Plenum, 1978).
8. J. Bransford and M. Johnson, "Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigation of Comprehension and Recall," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (1972): 722.
9. For a review written by one of these pioneers, who in turn describes several others, see S. Neuman, "The Role of Knowledge in Early Literacy," Reading Research Quarterly 36, no. 4 (November 2011): 468-75.
10. B. Boulay et al., Summary of Research Generated by Striving Readers on the Effectiveness of Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers, NCEE-2016-4001 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, October 2015).
11. For a paper that addresses many of the widespread misconceptions about critical thinking, see D. T. Willingham, "How to Teach Critical Thinking," commissioned paper, Education: Future Frontiers (May 2019).
12. Pearson et al., Reaping the Rewards.
13. R. K. Blank, "What Is the Impact of Decline in Science Instructional Time in Elementary School?: Time for Elementary Instruction Has Declined, and Less Time for Science Is Correlated with Lower Scores on NAEP," prepared for the Noyce Foundation, 2012.
14. See, for example, the Knowledge Matters Campaign, knowledgematterscampaign.org, and Curriculum Matters, curriculummatters.org.
15. C. McWayne et al., "Incorporating Knowledge from Children's Homes and Communities," Young Children 75, no. 5 (December 2020): 20-26.
16. J. Gustafson, "Robust Vocabulary Instruction: Bringing Knowledge-Rich Curricula to Life," Achieve the Core, September 30, 2019.
17. Z. Fang, "Scientific Literacy: A Systematic Functional Linguistics Perspective," Science Education 89, no. 2 (March 2005): 335-47.
18. Y. Zhang, "Supporting English Language Learners in Social Studies: Language-Focused Strategies," Social Studies 108 (2017): 2.
19. C. Shanahan and T. Shanahan, "Does Disciplinary Literacy Have a Place in Elementary School?," The Reading Teacher 67, no. 8 (2014): 636-39.
20. J. Kim et al., "Improving Reading Comprehension, Science Domain Knowledge, and Reading Engagement Through a First-Grade Content Literacy Intervention," Journal of Educational Psychology 113, no. 1 (2021): 3-26.
21. H. Hwang, S. Cabell, and R. Joyner, "Does Cultivating Content Knowledge During Literacy Instruction Support Vocabulary and Comprehension in the Elementary School Years?: A Systematic Review," Reading Psychology, manuscript under review.
22. J. Keenan and C. Meenan, "Test Differences in Diagnosing Reading Comprehension Deficits," Journal of Learning Disabilities 47, no. 2 (2014): 125-35.
23. J. Keenan, R. Betjemann, and R. Olson, "Reading Comprehension Tests Vary in the Skills They Assess: Differential Dependence on Decoding and Oral Language," Scientific Studies in Reading 12, no. 3 (2008): 281-300.
24. E. D. Hirsch Jr., Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
25. S. Koon, B. Foorman, and T. Galloway, "Identifying North Carolina Students at Risk of Scoring Below Proficient in Reading at the End of Grade 3," REL 2020-030 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, August 2020).
26. Every Student Succeeds Act, Pub. L. No. 114-95 (2015).
27. For the state's documents on the assessment, see "LEAP 2025 Humanities," Assessments, Louisiana Department of Education, louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/assessment.
28. Louisiana Believes, "Louisiana's Innovative Assessment Pilot National Update," Louisiana Department of Education, August 15, 2019.
29. Louisiana Believes, "Parent Guide to the LEAP 2025 Humanities Student Reports," Louisiana Department of Education, louisianabelieves.com/docs/default-source/assessment/parent-guide-to-leap-2025-humanities.pdf; and N. Munyan-Penney and C. Barone, "Innovative Assessment Pilot: Louisiana's LEAP 2025 Humanities Assessment," Education Reform Now, November 2020, edreformnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Louisiana-IADA-LEAP-2025-Humanities.pdf.
30. Pearson et al., Reaping the Rewards, 5.

[Illustrations by Jessie Lin]

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Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension

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It is February 2015, and I am at a national conference listening to a panel present the results of their research on improving reading comprehension. Several members of the panel, like myself and a few others in the room, are funded by the Institute of Education Sciences as part of the Reading for Understanding Initiative.

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The Challenge of a Challenging Text- Fisher, Frey & Shanahan

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The Challenge of a Challenging Text- Fisher, Frey & Shanahan

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How is reading complex text like lifting weights? Just as it's impossible to build muscle without weight or resistance, it's impossible to build robust reading skills without reading challenging text. The common core state standards in language arts treat text difficulty as akin to weight or resistance in an exercise program.

This is in contrast to most past discussion of this topic, which emphasized how overly complex text may impede learning. Such discussion therefore focused on developing various readability schemes and text gradients to help teachers determine which books might be too hard for their students. The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.

To help students learn to read complex texts, teachers need to answer the question, What do we mean when we say that a text is difficult? Readability formulas usually answer this question by measuring two factors: challenging vocabulary and long, complex sentences. Here we look at these factors along with several others that also affect readers' ability to comprehend text.

If you ask students what makes reading hard, they blame the words. And they're right to place so much importance on vocabulary: Authors introduce their ideas through words and phrases, and if readers don't know what these mean, there's little chance that they will make sense of the text. Studies show that higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.

Often, textbooks and teachers focus their attention on teaching students the vocabulary words that describe central concepts in science, history, mathematics, or literature. Domain-specific terms, such as erosion, Newton's third law of motion, rhombus, and metaphor, are sure to receive instructional emphasis in today's classrooms. However, these words are usually surrounded by other essential but more general academic terms, such as exerts, estimates, determines, distributed, resulting, culminates, and classify. These words, every bit as much as those in the first list, are used in particular ways in the various disciplines and warrant instructional attention. Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.

Words are not the whole picture. Sentence structure matters, too, because it determines how the words operate together. Thus, understanding the sentence "The stork was walking in the beautiful cornfield" requires more than just being able to define individual words. The sentence must also tell the reader how the ideas expressed by these words fit together (Which stork? Where was the stork? What was it doing?). If the text instead said, " Stork beautiful the walking in was the cornfield," all the same ideas would have been presented, yet readers would not understand the meaning.

Other aspects of sentence structure can determine how hard it is for readers to make sense of text. Shorter sentences, for example, tend to be easier to read than longer sentences; presumably, they put less demand on the reader's working memory. Longer sentences are likely to include multiple phrases or clauses, so they tend to include more ideas that have to be related to one another. They also have a greater density (longer noun or verb phrases) and more embedding (more complex relationships).

Authors construct such complicated sentences for a variety of reasons. In some cases, complex sentence structures are necessary to communicate the complexity of the information itself-thus the long noun phrases common in science. In literary passages, long-sentence writers like William Faulkner or Evelyn Waugh may be trying to get readers to slow down and explore the architecture of the thoughts and feelings being expressed. In attempting to convey emotional complexity, we might write a sentence like this:

The yellow snow blower that my father bought for my mother for their 15th wedding anniversary last year is now sitting in the garage, under a pile of old boxes and newspapers, where she left it that night, just before she threw her mobile phone, the one with my picture on it, at dad, and burst into tears.

The many layered phrases in this sentence express the complicated emotions connected with the events better than a series of shorter, clearer sentences would do. However, such sentences can be hard to untangle because of the demands they place on working memory: What happened just before the mother threw her phone? Who burst into tears? The verb phrase is so deeply embedded in this sentence that it can be hard, at first, to identify what is happening. If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text-phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.

Another challenge concerns how particular words, ideas, and sentences in text connect with one another, a feature referred to as coherence. Authors use pronouns, synonyms, ellipses, and other tools to connect the ideas across text. For example, take this simple passage:

John and Mary went to space camp. They liked it there. Of course, boys often like rockets, but Mary, too, enjoyed it.

The first sentence tells about something two children did. To make sense of the second sentence, the reader has to recognize that the pronoun they refers to the two children who were named in the first sentence and that there refers to space camp. Similarly, to interpret the third sentence, the reader has to link boys to John and recognize that it means the same thing as there did in the second sentence.

Younger students often have difficulty making such connections, especially if the ideas are far apart or the referents don't get restated frequently. Distant or complex cohesive links can also be challenging for second-language learners or for older students reading about an unfamiliar topic.

Ideas can be arranged across text in many ways, some more straightforward than others. For example, some kinds of text-such as a science experiment or a recipe-order events in a time sequence. This would also be true of some fiction or historical stories, but not all of them. You will most likely never see a writer play around with a time sequence in presenting a science experiment, but flashbacks in literature and nonsequential presentations of events in historical writing are common and important.

Other organizational structures include compare-contrast and problem-solution. For example, in science texts, detailed comparisons between species like alligators and crocodiles or between concepts like meiosis and mitosis are common. Similarly, problem-solution structures are evident in both science and social studies; for example, an essay might explain multiple causes of water pollution and then explore multiple solutions for each of these causes. Some organizational structures are used to organize particular text features; for example, a social studies textbook may include particular categories of detailed information (history, geography, economics, and culture) in each chapter.

Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text. For example, it's easier to follow Moby Dick if you know that it is a narrative of a voyage punctuated by a series of digressions-that one chapter might move the story forward, followed by another that describes the anatomy of whales, the history of whaling, or a sermon that one might hear in a whaling-town church in the 19th century.

Vocabulary, sentence structure, coherence, and organization can all be determined by closely analyzing the text itself. A final determinant of text difficulty, however, depends on the reader's prior knowledge.

For example, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is often recommended for use with adolescents. Hemingway's language is spare and plain; he uses common words, and his sentences are often short, without embedding or complexity. A text gradient analysis would place this text at a 6th grade reading level.

Yet many students at this age would have difficulty understanding this beautiful book. The reason is obviously not in the book itself but in the interaction between the reader and the book. Few preteens have had the emotional experiences that would prepare them to understand the old man's determination to maintain hope and dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.

Knowledge of text complexity can help teachers design three important components of literacy instruction: building skills, establishing purpose, and fostering motivation.

Let's face it: Some students can't make sense of a complex text because they can't decode it. Any older student who still struggles with decoding needs intervention to address this difficulty.

But even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.

Fluency instruction becomes more powerful when it's taught not as an end in itself, but rather in the context of students' attempts to make sense of a particular text. True fluency is not merely lining up one sentence after another and reading them aloud quickly; it's also maintaining understanding across a text. Therefore, fluency instruction should emphasize sentence structure and meaning. Teachers should have students pause to discuss the meaning of the text. They should pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.

Ongoing, solid vocabulary instruction is another essential component to help students develop skill in reading complex text. This instruction should focus not just on domain-specific words and phrases that describe the central concepts in the subject area, but also on general academic words. Effective vocabulary instruction usually provides a rich exploration of word meanings, in which students do more than just copy dictionary definitions-they consider synonyms, antonyms, categories, and specific examples for the words under study.

Students also explore the connections among words, considering other words in the same category, comparing and contrasting words with similar meanings, evaluating or constructing analogies, and building word webs. They also have opportunities to use the words in reading, writing, speaking, listening, drawing, and even physically acting them out. As students analyze the use of the vocabulary terms in text, teachers can guide them to think about the meanings that the authors intended to convey (for example, the differences in implication between nosey and curious, or cheap and frugal).

Recently, we were asked to explain why a passage about deserts was challenging for readers. As we started to read the text, we noticed its beautiful language, vivid imagery, and well-wrought descriptions. Despite its beauty, however, we found it hard to make sense of this passage. The problem was that we couldn't tell whether it was meant to be a literary text or a scientific one. Without knowing what kind of text we were reading or what we were expected to do with the information, we had no idea what to attend to.

Students often find themselves in this kind of bind. Younger children frequently encounter hybrid texts that combine a narrative story with expository information. For example, in the Magic School Bus books, the characters take field trips to learn about electricity, weather, dinosaurs, and other topics. When reading these books, children need to determine whether to focus on the story of the field trip or the information about the concepts. Until they figure it out, they may feel confused.

Older students are confronted with texts from science, history, mathematics, and literature; and they have to grasp the purposes for reading each of these texts so that they can focus their attention appropriately. For example, science texts focus heavily on causation. These texts convey information about what causes what, but they are not typically concerned with the intention behind these events. Students reading a science text may learn that apples grow on trees and that birds eat them, which plays an important role in spreading the seeds around, which creates even more apple trees; however, readers will not be expected to question whether apples grow on trees intentionally so that birds may eat them. In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.

In clearly communicating the purpose of reading to students, teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading. For the text about deserts, for example, establishing the purpose, "Determine the difference between desert and tundra biomes" would direct the reading differently from establishing the purpose, "Examine the author's use of imagery and consider how you could apply it in your own writing." Although both of these purposes are worthwhile, reading for one purpose while performing a task for another would likely result in confusion and even failure. When students struggle to understand the task, they pay less attention to the text itself.

Over time, as students read with purpose, they develop background knowledge and a deeper understanding of the organizational structures authors use to convey information. This understanding gives students access to increasingly complex texts.

Learning to read challenging text is similar to undergoing physical therapy. Initially, such therapy is often painful and exhausting, and it's tempting to cheat on the exercises a bit. Physical therapists have to focus not only on the muscle groups that need to be strengthened or stretched, but also on the patient's motivation. They need to keep the patient's head in the game, because working past the pain is beneficial.

Similarly, it can be tough for students to hang in there and stick with a text that they have to labor through, looking up words, puzzling over sentences, straining to make connections. Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger. Teachers need to motivate students to keep trying, especially when the level of work is increasing. The payoff comes from staying on track.

A good physical therapist knows what good teachers know: You need to create successive successes. Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction. They apply their growing competence outside the company of their teacher by reading texts that match their independent reading ability. Over time, they engage in close reading of texts of their own choosing, as well as assigned texts that build their subject-area knowledge. All the while, they set goals with their teachers so that they can gauge their own progress. Forward motion toward a goal matters.

Gone are the days when text was judged as difficult solely on the basis of sentence length and syllable count. We now know that many factors affect text complexity. With this increased understanding, teachers do not have to rely on intuition to figure out which books their students can handle. Instead, teachers can select texts worthy of instruction and align their instructional efforts to ensure that all their students read complex, interesting, and important texts.

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When teachers understand what makes texts complex, they can better support their students in reading them.

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Letting the Text Take Center Stage- Timothy Shanahan

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Letting the Text Take Center Stage- Timothy Shanahan

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There is an iconic childhood moment that spans generations. My father, a boy in a clapboarded, one-room schoolhouse, along with the only other student in his grade, endured it; I timidly shared the experience with 50 Pattys, Connies, and Billys shoehorned tightly into an amber-lit classroom; the children I taught did it (seemingly a lifetime ago); and the young teens I watched last week in the midst of a middle school science lesson, their teacher patrolling the aisles, persevered at it as well.

The event to which I refer is the one in which a teacher leads a group of students in the communal act of reading a text. Such communal reading events are usually aimed at transforming children into readers or exposing them to science or social studies information. This event has been repeated so often in each of our lives that it may seem more like a Norman Rockwell painting than an actual memory: the boy wiggling in his chair, the dutiful pigtailed girl, the teacher's opaque questions, children's hands waving in the air, a monotone child's voice quavering as it makes its way uncertainly up the street of sentences.

One can also easily imagine a visit from the proverbial Martian anthropologist. Considering the ubiquity of communal reading, or what I call "the reading lesson," and its sameness across otherwise diverse classrooms, it would likely be classified as ritual. And as ritual, this little green observer would try to determine which of the actions maintained any discernible functional purpose and which had become purely symbolic, persisting mainly for the sake of tradition. Social scientists have long speculated about the reason for rituals; many now think they express and reinforce the shared values and belief systems of a society. ¹ Our extraterrestrial visitor would surely want to know more about our reading lessons.

But we'll come back to that.

Common Core State Standards

In 1989, members of the National Governors Association (NGA) agreed to take the lead on educational reform. The agreement called for states to set educational goals or standards, with some federal assistance. ² By the early 1990s, all 50 states had done so, but not necessarily standards rigorous enough to propel students toward college or career readiness-nor was there leverage to ensure that even these undernourished standards would be reached by sufficient numbers of students. ³

In 2002, this changed in a big way. No Child Left Behind became the law of the land, and it put federal financial support for education at risk if students failed to meet a state's standards. The result wasn't higher achievement, however. Instead of working more diligently to meet these standards, most states simply reduced their already low criteria to keep the federal dollars flowing. ⁴

In 2009, the NGA, now in concert with the Council of Chief State School Officers and with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, endorsed the idea of common or shared educational standards across states. Instead of each state setting up its own idiosyncratic goals in math and reading, this plan would have all or most states striving, for once, to accomplish the same outcomes. By the time the dust settled, a new set of standards had been written and adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia (this is the number that embraced the English language arts standards, but only 45 states accepted the math goals-Minnesota made a split decision).

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as they are known, are a major advance not only because of their shared nature, but also because they represent a more rigorous set of goals than most individual states had previously adopted. The standards' authors were plainspoken in their claim that these were new learning goals, not methodologies, for teaching: ⁵

Fact: The best understanding of what works in the classroom comes from the teachers who are in them. That's why these standards will establish what students need to learn, but they will not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standards.

And yet, these standards will likely lead to the greatest changes in reading instruction seen for generations. One of the biggest transformations will be to reading lessons, involving changes that will upset traditional approaches that have been in place for decades. These communal reading lessons have gone by many names (e.g., directed reading lessons, guided reading), but all variations include a group of students reading a text together under the supervision of a teacher, and it is that daily event that will change most.

Matching Students to Books versus Having Them Grapple with Challenging Texts

Past educational standards have been stated in terms of cognitive behaviors or actions that students must learn to exhibit. For example, here is a typical fifth-grade reading goal, this one from Virginia, one of the four states that did not adopt the CCSS: "The student will read and demonstrate comprehension of fictional texts, narrative nonfiction, and poetry." ⁶ Some of the ways the students have to demonstrate this ability is by describing character development, identifying cause-and-effect relationships, and summarizing supporting details from such texts. As such, standards tend to be verb-centric; they describe a whole lot of locating, inferring, connecting, and comparing.

This characteristic Virginia standard describes a cognitive action students are to do, but it does not tell how well students need to do it or what the level of challenge should be. Prior to the CCSS, standards usually ignored the fact that some texts are harder to read than others. ⁷ Drawing inferences or making comparisons in an easy text is, well, easy, while trying to do so in a more complicated one is quite another thing. Look at the simple comparison of Fun with Dick and Jane and James Joyce's Ulysses (see Table 1 below).* Even with such brief segments, it should be apparent that making sense of the old primer is a much easier lift than making sense of the modernist classic. Dick simply doesn't do much beyond running and jumping, while Leopold Bloom's day is a rich mix of goings-on. Dick is narrow, too, in emotional terms, but Bloom displays an impressive gamut of hope, reluctance, lust, regret, envy, self-satisfaction, uncertainty, trepidation, and relief. Analyzing characterization in one book is a major intellectual challenge, while doing so in the other is a necessary, though comparatively modest, accomplishment along the road to literacy. This is a big difference, and yet past standards couldn't distinguish any difference. By ignoring the challenge level of texts, standards made it look like students were reaching goals even when performance levels were embarrassingly low; remember this the next time someone tells you that their previous state standards were every bit as demanding as the CCSS ⁸ -they are, if one only looks at the verbs and ignores the texts those verbs operate on.

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Think of it this way: if states had adopted weightlifting requirements, instead of reading requirements, past standards would have said "all students should do bench presses," but would have omitted any mention of how much weight had to be on the bar or how many reps were expected. Let's face it, bench-pressing 5 pounds once, which almost all of us could do, is nothing like bench-pressing 100 pounds 10 times, which few of us could do. And that is what we have been doing: emptily requiring particular mental gymnastics during reading, without consideration of challenge levels.

The CCSS change that equation. At each grade level, there are 10 reading comprehension standards. The first nine note the same kinds of cognitive processes long emphasized in standards, but the 10th one, in grades 2 through 12, sets a specific level of text challenge.

What is the problem with this for teachers? It flies in the face of everything they have been taught. Reading authorities have been dogmatic about the value of appropriate book placement, and the need to differentiate book placement by reading levels has been the major approach to differentiation; ⁹ this is where ideas like the old "three reading groups" and the more recent "book rooms" have come from. The claim has been that there is a special text level at which students should be taught if they are to make optimum learning gains. This theory holds that if students are taught from texts that are easier or harder than their "instructional level," then less learning or no learning results. Accordingly, teachers have been taught not to give their students hard texts to read. But now the CCSS are requiring just that.

That this is disquieting is an understatement. It seems to be a violation of principle and a rejection of the research evidence that teachers have been admonished to follow. This is why teachers are so surprised to find that there is not really a firm base of research supporting the idea of matching kids to texts. ¹⁰ Despite the ubiquity of the practice, research has found no consistent relationship of student-text match and learning. ¹¹ Despite the hard work of so many teachers to make certain that students are in the "just right" book, doing so does not appear to promote better learning.

It is not that student and text levels don't matter-they are certainly part of the learning equation-but so is the amount of support or scaffolding that teachers provide. Unfortunately, teacher preparation typically includes few tools for helping students to learn from challenging texts. No wonder teachers so often resort to reading the texts to students, using round-robin reading, or, in history or science, not using the textbook at all.

Under the CCSS, students will be more frustrated by challenging texts, and this means other instructional supports will be needed to help and encourage them along this path. Teachers must learn to anticipate text challenges and how to support students to allow them to negotiate texts successfully, but without doing the work for them. Look, for example, at the fifth-grade science passage in Table 2 (below); a text like this, previously, would have appeared in a sixth- or even seventh-grade textbook, but will be served up to 10-year-olds under the CCSS. A major challenge posed by this passage is that it is difficult to get all the ideas connected properly into an explanatory chain. ¹² For example, the word "it" is used repeatedly throughout this paragraph, sometimes referring to the nebula, sometimes to the protoplanetary disk, and sometimes to the sun's gravity. Guiding students to make the right links and to weave these chains of meaning together can help them make sense of the text without just telling them what it says.

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Similar supports can help students interpret sophisticated vocabulary or literary devices, untangle the tortured syntax of complex sentences, or discern subtle organizational structures or bewildering authorial tones. Such instruction, however, looks less like traditional reading lessons and more like team problem-solving, with teachers offering guidance and support, and the children reading and rereading to figure out the meaning.

Preparing to Read versus Actually Reading

Reading lessons have not actually started with reading for a very long time. Instead, such lessons usually prepare students to think about the text they are working on prior to reading, and such preparation can take substantial classroom time. Reading preparation includes discussions of relevant background information, explanations of context in which the text was produced, previews or overviews of the text itself, "picture walks," predictions, and purpose-setting.

Common Core proponents espouse a less thorough regime of reading preparation. ¹³ The explanation of why the CCSS are taking on this sacred cow goes back centuries and has much to do with arguments over the nature of reading itself. The anti-reading-preparation stance can be traced all the way back to the Protestant Reformation. One of Martin Luther's basic tenets was that ordinary laypeople could read the Bible themselves, without an intermediary priest to interpret for them. Four hundred years later, the same argument divided English departments: Could students read literature without the explanations and interpretations of their professors? The result was the "New Criticism," and its advocates championed the idea of "close reading": having students read and reread texts while paying close attention to the words and structure, with little reliance on other information. ¹⁴ The New Critics believed meaning resided not in the context or author's intentions that produced it, but in the words the author used to give expression. ¹⁵ Exit considerations of the author's biographical details or the teacher's interpretations of the text; enter an intensive focus on the texts themselves-not just on what a text had to say, but how it worked-how the author's words or structures aligned with the meaning. Basically, texts were viewed as complete unto themselves, without need for additional information about the author or opinions from other people or texts. As such, they were coherent representations of meaning and craft that students could make sense of if taught what to pay attention to and given an opportunity to analyze the text-and the text alone-carefully. ¹⁶

This sparser view of reading preparation conflicts with the daily reading ritual found in most US classrooms. Instead of guiding students to read texts closely, such lessons usually provide a veritable flood of extra information-previews, explanations, and reading purposes, along with analysis of relevant context or background information and the like. If students are to read about tide pools, for example, teachers are counseled to start out by asking questions such as, "Have you ever visited a beach? What plants and animals did you see near the shore?" Or if students are to read Charlotte's Web, they might first learn the biographical details of E. B. White's life.

With so much of that preparation, the reading itself sometimes must be sacrificed; it is almost always attenuated. I recently observed a primary-grade reading lesson that included such a thorough and painstaking picture walk (previewing and discussing each illustration prior to reading) that eventually there was no reason for reading the eight-sentence story; there was no additional information to be learned.

"Close reading" sounds like a welcome idea that could push kids and teachers back into books. But there can be problems with such a scorched-earth approach to reading preparation, not the least of which is evidence from research suggesting that some such supports can actually improve comprehension. Such research seems particularly germane at a time when texts are supposed to get harder for kids.

If you ask most teachers the reason for all of the reading preparation, their most likely reply would be their students' "lack of background" or "lack of prior knowledge." What they mean is that their kids don't know very much about the topics to be read about, and that matters, because learning, to an extent, depends on what is already known. † The great variation in academic background that students bring to school makes this issue particularly vexing for teachers. Cognitive psychology has defined reading comprehension in terms of a reader's ability to integrate text information with prior knowledge to form a mental representation or memory. ¹⁷ Thus, "close reading" of a text for which one lacks the necessary background information required to understand it may not be a very productive process for some learners. As a fairly thorough review of research on the role of prior knowledge in reading explained: ¹⁸

Across all levels of age and ability, readers use their existing knowledge as a filter to interpret and construct meaning of a given text. They use this knowledge to determine importance, to draw inference, to elaborate text, and to monitor comprehension.

Extensive research into readers' knowledge consistently finds that readers interpret texts through their background knowledge and that they store text information in their memories as if storing it in a filing cabinet, combining the new information into existing files. While these findings are not at issue, current approaches to facilitating the use of prior knowledge in reading have calcified into rigid routines that may no longer be consistent with either research or our learning goals for students.

If a text presupposes some reader knowledge, providing such information ahead of time can facilitate comprehension. ¹⁹ For example, consider this old Henny Youngman joke: "Doctor, my leg hurts. What can I do?" The doctor says, "Limp!" The listener must recognize the reason someone tells a physician about a bum leg is to get advice on how to alleviate the problem. The humor comes from the violation of expectations that occurs when this apocryphal doctor takes the question literally rather than as a request for assistance. If the audience knows why the man would ask his doctor such a question, the joke can work; without it, a "close reading" isn't likely to get you there. Background knowledge is needed to bridge the gap, and providing such knowledge ahead of time can enhance understanding. That's one point for pre-reading preparation.

Similarly, activating already existing prior knowledge-that is, getting students to think about what they already know about a topic-can be helpful, too. Thus, having students discuss a topic prior to reading can improve understanding ²⁰ even when such a discussion does not offer any new information. Students can even be taught to conduct this kind of prior knowledge activation themselves. ²¹ But, research also suggests that activating prior knowledge does not always pay off; sometimes it can even backfire, such as when the readers' knowledge conflicts with information in the text. ²² On balance, while the research offers a note of caution, this is another point in support of pre-reading preparation.

However, as useful as knowledge is in the interpretive process, pre-reading preparations have grown into something contradictory to good sense. Given how ubiquitous background reviewing has become, it is no wonder that teachers and publishers have slipped into a somewhat perfunctory and ritualistic use of these practices. Background preparation is provided not only when it is needed, such as when a text is particularly unfamiliar to students or when an author presupposes particular information that would aid comprehension, but almost always during these pre-reading preparations. Such background preparation may even be irrelevant to the comprehension challenges that students face. They are not likely to benefit much from visualizing E. B. White's barn prior to reading Charlotte's Web, since that won't help them with the real challenge of making sense of the book, but they may benefit from background preparation on the big issues of friendship and loyalty, and on the notion of the life cycle and how we proceed as a species even after individual deaths.

Another point of concern should be the extent of the background preparation. In many studies in which activating prior knowledge was found to be beneficial, background knowledge was activated by nothing more than giving students the topic or a title for an article.23 Given that readers use their prior knowledge, making it obvious to them what knowledge to use can be facilitating. But unlike in these studies, in many classrooms, reading lessons incorporate extensive reviews of background information-way more than is justified by actual research findings.

Of course, one person's presupposed background information is another's plot summary. One group of researchers ²⁴ found that giving information ahead of time powerfully enhanced comprehension and recall. However, what they offered was an extensive preview that was repetitive of the text itself. Students were asked to discuss a theme-related topic prior to reading a story; they were also given a story synopsis and a description of the setting, each character was introduced and described, the author's point of view was specified, and the plots were revealed up to the point of climax. It seems pretty obvious that students who received such previews answered more questions about the text than students who did not. Sometimes the questions could be answered from the preview itself, while in other cases students could use the previewed information to formulate logical inferences about the text, or, failing that, they could reduce their amount of reading effort by focusing attention on only the unknown information ("since I already know everything up to the resolution, I'll read that and find out how it comes out"). Is this really a boon to reading comprehension, or is such preparation simply taking the place of reading? Think of it this way: Are teachers really going to follow kids through college and career-or even into their accountability exams-preparing them for each text they are to read?

Part of the point of the CCSS (and of "close reading") is that text must play the central role in reading and cannot profitably be ignored. Students who are engaged in a discussion of the life cycle or of friendship prior to reading Charlotte's Web likely have some advantage in grasping the ideas from that book more quickly or more certainly. But is that really the point of reading instruction: to make kids into quick but somewhat shallow recognizers and comprehenders? We need to remember that one can read a text more than once, and that the purpose of reading is to interpret the text based on the information on the page rather than from the pre-reading activity initiated by the teacher. Unfortunately, previewing has devolved from a brief "look over" into telling students key information from the text before they get a chance to read it themselves. This deprives them of any opportunity to make sense of-or simply enjoy-the text without the teacher predigesting it for them.

The CCSS place the text-not the teacher-at the center of the students' negotiation of text meaning. Accordingly, they want pre-reading rituals reduced. It is certainly okay for a teacher to provide a brief introduction to a text so that students have some idea of what they are being asked to read, what genre it is, and why they should read it: "Now we'll read a play about a boy's first day at school," or "We've been reading about the Civil War, and this next chapter will tell us about the final stages of the war and how it was won." Such previews are sufficient preparation, allowing students to activate any prior knowledge they may have. It is also acceptable to use such preparation to fill gaps in student knowledge: "We're going to read about Antarctica, and the chapter will tell you a lot about it, but it doesn't make it very clear where Antarctica is. Let's find it on our map before we read about it."

None of these examples would steal appreciable time from reading, and in none would the teacher provide much information in place of what the author is going to provide. Instead of preparing students so thoroughly that they confront no problems in understanding a text, briefer introductions simply get students started. Any interpretive problems that may ensue can be dealt with along the way.

How much background information is appropriate depends on the text. If students are to read a story set during the Civil War, but not much about the war is revealed in the text, there is nothing wrong with telling or reminding students when and where the war took place and what it was about. That, as research has shown, can help students interpret the text, and it is probably consistent with what the author expected of his or her reading audience. But telling this same information before reading a book that does teach readers about the Civil War is unreasonable because it gets between the text and the reader. This shift away from extensive and repetitive spoilers to a more pointed and strategic introduction should allow students to understand what is expected of them and to use their prior knowledge in making sense of the text.

Discussion of Text versus Integrating Knowledge and Ideas

Then what? Usually, students read, teachers ask questions about what they have read, and students respond to these questions, sometimes even answering them. Many teachers would tell you these questions ensure that kids read the book. However, research suggests such questions can do more than that. Teachers' questions can influence student reading comprehension by highlighting which information is most important. If, during a history reading lesson, the teacher asks about dates, students will, over time, become more vigilant about dates. Teachers' questions serve as a training guide that shows students what information to pay attention to while reading. Studies also reveal that some questions generate deeper and more extensive thinking than others, and engaging in deeper thinking also promotes higher comprehension. ²⁵

Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy is probably the most widely known scheme for formulating such questions. ²⁶ It arrays behaviors from simple to more complex, depending on the degree of difficulty or the amount of intellectual demand. Knowledge is the lowest level in this taxonomy, and it refers to memory for facts, terms, or basic concepts. It is followed by comprehension, which requires a restatement of information into one's own words, or organizing or interpreting the information, such as determining a main idea. Then comes application, the use of information in a new context; followed by analysis, in which one examines and breaks information down into its parts, makes inferences about relationships, and finds evidence to support generalizations; which is followed by synthesis, in which information is combined in new ways. Finally, at the highest level of demand is evaluation, the making of judgments to assess validity or quality.

Other questioning schemes for reading tend to be consistent with Bloom's taxonomy. ²⁷ They place recall of what a text explicitly says at the most basic level, followed by the logical inferencing that readers need to fill gaps or make connections implied by the author, to high-level evaluations or judgments about the information.

The CCSS do not discuss levels of questions or levels of thinking this overtly, and yet they have their own considerations for question formulation. Thus, the Q&A follow-up to reading is not going away any time soon, while some very different questions are likely to be asked during reading lessons due to the CCSS.

The CCSS question-asking convention garnering the most attention so far has to do with the idea of "text-dependent questions." This idea is drawn from testing and refers to whether students need to read the text to answer. ²⁸ This is evaluated by giving students the test questions without the texts to determine if they can be answered correctly anyway. Given that the CCSS are placing the text at the center of reading in so many ways, it should not be surprising that they emphasize the idea of asking questions specifically about the text.

The problem with text dependency is that it is easy to ask questions that depend upon the text but are not very important within the universe created by that text. Table 3 (below) illustrates this with various text-dependent questions about well-known fairy tales. It would be impossible to answer any of these questions without knowing the texts-which accomplishes the text-dependency criterion-but only some of these questions would be worth asking. The point of the CCSS is to emphasize the text above all else in text discussions, not to turn such discussions into quiz-show trivia. Even a cursory examination of examples of so-called text-dependent questions on the Internet suggests that many educators are getting the first idea, but not the second.

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Unlike with various question-asking taxonomies, memory questions in the CCSS are not necessarily low level, with evaluative ones automatically placed higher in the pecking order. The issue is initially one of relevance to the text, but once relevancy or dependency is satisfied, it is essential to recognize that not all relevant questions are equal. One can ask inconsequential questions about an experience: "Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

How do you determine which questions are worth asking? The CCSS provide valuable guidance in the form of their organizational plan for reading. The reading standards are divided into three categories: key ideas and details, craft and structure, and the integration of knowledge and ideas.

This blueprint seems to harken back to an approach to "close reading" first espoused by two scholars in 1940. ²⁹ They advocated the idea that great books be read multiple times, with each reading constituting a separate journey, and each of these journeys resolving different concerns. According to this approach, a first reading would be about figuring out what a text says. If one were reading a story, then being able to describe the characters and their motivations and to retell the plot would be crucial, since those would usually represent the key ideas and important details of a story or novel. Similarly, if one were reading a science experiment, it would be important to understand the purpose of the experiment, the basic steps undertaken, and the results. The important reading issue here isn't whether the author stated it explicitly, which would just require recognition or memory, or whether the idea was implied and required some kind of logical inference by the reader, but whether the information mattered in the context of the text.

What information will be important cannot be determined separately from the text; thus, if one follows question-asking schemes too carefully, trivial questions almost always result. For example, knowing why the dog is called "Old Yeller" in Fred Gibson's book by the same name is not very important in the context of that book, since it is more a description of the dog than a true name. This is not to suggest names don't ever matter. Knowing the names of the characters in East of Eden is essential, since some of those names are literary allusions connecting these characters to those in Genesis. Asking about the names of the brothers Caleb and Aron would be placed very low in Bloom's taxonomy and yet would be encouraged by the CCSS because of their centrality to the matter at hand, making deep sense of this text.

In many reading lessons, when students can retell the key ideas and details of a text and answer questions about it, teachers often declare victory and move on. But the CCSS advocate reading such texts yet again, this time to make sense of the workings of their craft and structure, or how the text said what it said. How did the author organize the information? What literary devices or data presentation devices were used, and what was their effect? Why did the author choose this word or that word? Were the meanings of key terms consistent or did they change with use across the text? Such second readings may require a full rereading of the whole selection, but often no more than a series of targeted second looks at specific portions of the text-portions relevant to craft and structure-is sufficient. Thus, after the first round of reading East of Eden, the teacher may have established that the names of the brothers were Caleb and Aron, but now the teacher will start probing about the meaning of the name of the book: Is it a good name? Why or why not? What does it refer to? Has anyone heard of Eden in any other context? Are there any clues in the book that help you to make sense of that name? Eventually, such questions will guide students to look for parallels between Cain and Abel, and Caleb and Aron. (It should be noted that the heavy emphasis on analyzing the language of the texts has not been common in states' standards prior to the CCSS.)

Again, not all questions about craft and structure are going to be important (nor are craft and structure considered to be higher-level considerations than key ideas and details). Craft and structure questions should matter to the interpretation of the text at hand. In one text, a title or a name or some other fact may serve as no more than a bit of description, while in another, these seemingly "low-level facts" might be essential to understanding how the text works. With history texts or rhetorical texts, like speeches or political tracts, analysis of word choices or even the inclusion of particular facts can be enough to allow the reader to determine an author's biases or point of view. In a science text, carefully tracing the author's chain of reasoning can help assess the evidence supporting a theory or uncover discrepancies or errors in logic.

With the information gleaned from the first two readings, the reader is now ready to go even deeper into integrating knowledge and ideas: What does this text mean? What was the author's point? What does it have to say about our lives or our world? How valid is it? How good is it? How does it connect to other texts (or to other experiences, videos, or experiments)? By waiting until we have achieved a deep understanding of a text-of what it says and how it works-we are finally in a good position to critically evaluate the text and to compare its ideas and approach with those of other texts.

Finally, for each of these readings, in answering any of the types of questions emphasized in the CCSS, students are expected to do more than provide answers. They are required to glean information from texts as evidence that supports and justifies the conclusions they draw and the connections they make. It is not enough to get the right answer; students must become adept at collecting and using information that they gain when reading the texts.

* * *

Cultural practices that initially accomplish functional purposes, through repetition and the fullness of time, often lose their functionality and become traditions that convey other meanings to those within the culture. Various factors have guided the reading lesson across the decades. Teachers have often tried to follow research in this regard, assigning students relatively easy materials to ensure adequate levels of comprehension, providing extensive previews and background information toward the same end, and monitoring student reading with questions calculated to be at a high intellectual level.

However, teachers have been misled as to the strength or direction of the research related to issues such as the importance of matching text difficulty levels with student reading levels. Accurate research findings have been stretched beyond their original scope in support of classroom practices never actually evaluated by research. For example, the research finding that activating background knowledge can improve reading comprehension under some circumstances has been transformed into the idea that background activation is needed before every reading and that such efforts must be extensive and continuous. Sometimes a research-supported view (e.g., the idea that questions eliciting higher-order thinking tend to build comprehension better than those aimed at memory alone) simply gets twisted in the application. If teachers, textbook publishers, and test makers decide that they need to ask a particular type of question for every text, then, at least some of the time, such questions will be tangential to particular texts.

As practices are inadvertently transformed from functional purposes to symbolic rituals, one starts to wonder about larger cultural implications. With the reading lesson, the daily rituals increasingly have elbowed the text aside. Instead of serving to focus students' attention on making sense of each text within its own interpretative universe, the reading lesson has too often conveyed to students that reading is a ceremonial event to which the text is of only marginal importance. Thus, we mistakenly worry more about how well the text matches the student reading level than whether it is worth reading at all; we inappropriately tell students what a text says before they have a chance to read it themselves (thereby minimizing the demands of actual reading); and we regrettably ask questions that, although of high intellectual level, probe more into the reader's background experiences than into the text itself.

Perhaps the purpose of this ritual has somehow been to celebrate the students themselves-it is, after all, their reading levels, their background knowledge, and their experiences that seem to be of greatest import in these daily observances. Paradoxically, by putting the focus on students in this way, they too may be marginalized. Instead of emphasizing the ideas in texts, and empowering students to understand those ideas-what they are, how they are expressed, and what they mean-we have ritually kept students in a state of ignorance and helplessness. In a milieu in which everything of importance is told, where ideas can be gained without the hard currency of analytical and critical thought, where one's reach is never allowed to exceed one's grasp, and where all opinions are equal and there are no consequential facts upon which to make decisions, the individual's value is diminished. The most important fact about the Common Core State Standards may be that they are getting educators to rethink this ritual-and to move ideas, and thinking about ideas, back to the center of the reading curriculum.
Timothy Shanahan is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the director of its Center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for Chicago Public Schools. A past president of the International Reading Association, he is 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. His research and teaching focus on reading achievement and family literacy.
*By the end of high school, the Common Core's recommended texts are very complex-complex enough to prepare students for college-level texts like Ulysses.

†For more on how reading comprehension depends on knowledge and vocabulary, see the Spring 2006 issue of American Educator, available at www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2006/index.cfm.

Endnotes

1. Evangelos Kyriakidis, ed., The Archaeology of Ritual (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2007).

2. John F. Jennings, Why National Standards and Tests? Politics and the Quest for Better Schools (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).

3. Laura S. Hamilton, Brian M. Stecher, and Kun Yuan, Standards-Based Reform in the United States: History, Research, and Future Directions (Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy, 2008).

4. Hamilton, Stecher, and Yuan, Standards-Based Reform.

5. National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, "Myths vs. Facts," 2010, accessed August 20, 2013, www.corestandards.org/resources/myths-vs-facts.

6. Virginia Department of Education, English Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools (Richmond: Virginia Department of Education, 2010), 17, www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/english/2010/stds_all_english.pdf.

7. Arthur C. Graesser and Joseph P. Magliano, "Context and Cognition," in Context and Development, ed. Robert Cohen and Alexander W. Siegel (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991); and Paul van den Broek, Catherine M. Bohn-Gettler, Panayiota Kendeou, Sarah Carlson, and Mary Jane White, "When a Reader Meets a Text: The Role of Standards of Coherence in Reading Comprehension," in Text Relevance and Learning from Text, ed. Matthew T. McCrudden, Joseph P. Magliano, and Gregory Schraw (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2011), 123-139.

8. Joy Pullmann, "Why Indiana Should Delay the Common Core," Indianapolis Star, February 28, 2013; and Virginia Department of Education, Comparison of Virginia's 2010 English Standards of Learning with the Common Core State Standards for English and Literacy (Richmond: Virginia Department of Education, 2010).

9. Emmett A. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction (New York: American Book Co., 1946); and Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996).

10. Rollanda E. O'Connor, H. Lee Swanson, and Cathleen Geraghty, "Improvement in Reading Rate Under Independent and Difficult Text Levels: Influences on Word and Comprehension Skills," Journal of Educational Psychology 102, no. 1 (2010): 1-19; William R. Powell, Reappraising the Criteria for Interpreting Informal Inventories (Washington, DC: ERIC, 1968); and Timothy Shanahan, "The Informal Reading Inventory and the Instructional Level: The Study That Never Took Place," in Reading Research Revisited, ed. Lance M. Gentile, Michael L. Kamil, and Jay S. Blanchard (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1983), 577-580.

11. Alisa Morgan, Bradley R. Wilcox, and J. Lloyd Eldredge, "Effect of Difficulty Levels on Second-Grade Delayed Readers Using Dyad Reading," Journal of Educational Research 94, no. 2 (2000): 113-119; O'Connor, Swanson, and Geraghty, "Improvement in Reading Rate"; and Powell, Reappraising the Criteria.

12. Zhihui Fang and Mary J. Schleppegrell, Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

13. David Coleman, "Bringing the Common Core to Life," April 28, 2011, transcript and video available at http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/resources/bringing-the-common-core-to-life.html.

14. Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2006).

15. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Dennis Dobson, 1947).

16. Gerald Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

17. Walter Kintsch, Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

18. Janice A. Dole, Gerald G. Duffy, Laura R. Roehler, and P. David Pearson, "Moving from the Old to the New: Research on Reading Comprehension Instruction," Review of Educational Research 61, no. 2 (1991): 241.

19. Kathleen C. Stevens, "Can We Improve Reading by Teaching Background Information?," Journal of Reading 25, no. 4 (1982): 326-329.

20. Hiller A. Spires and Jan Donley, "Prior Knowledge Activation: Inducing Engagement with Informational Texts," Journal of Educational Psychology 90, no. 2 (1998): 249-260.

21. Sonya C. Carr and Bruce Thompson, "The Effects of Prior Knowledge and Schema Activation Strategies on the Inferential Reading Comprehension of Children with and without Learning Disabilities," Learning Disability Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1996): 48-61.

22. Donna E. Alvermann, Lynn C. Smith, and John E. Readence, "Prior Knowledge Activation and the Comprehension of Compatible and Incompatible Text," Reading Research Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1985): 420-436.

23. John D. Bransford and Marcia K. Johnson, "Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, no. 6 (1972): 717-726; Ann L. Brown, Sandra S. Smiley, Jeanne D. Day, Michael A. R. Townsend, and Sallie C. Lawton, "Intrusion of a Thematic Idea in Children's Comprehension and Retention of Stories," Child Development 48, no. 4 (1977): 1454-1466; and Diane Lemonnier Schallert, "Improving Memory for Prose: The Relationship between Depth of Processing and Context," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 15, no. 6 (1976): 621-632.

24. Michael F. Graves, Cheryl L. Cooke, and Michael J. Laberge, "Effects of Previewing Difficult Short Stories on Low Ability Junior High School Students' Comprehension, Recall, and Attitudes," Reading Research Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1983): 262-276.

25. Matthew T. McCrudden, Gregory Schraw, and Stephen Lehman, "The Use of Adjunct Displays to Facilitate Comprehension of Causal Relationships in Expository Text," Instructional Science 37, no. 1 (2009): 65-86.

26. Benjamin S. Bloom, Max D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walker H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals; Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain (New York: Longman, 1956).

27. See, for example, Frederick B. Davis, "Research in Comprehension in Reading," Reading Research Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1968): 499-545; Betty C. Holmes, "The Effect of Four Different Modes of Reading on Comprehension," Reading Research Quarterly 20, no. 5 (1985): 575-585; P. David Pearson and Dale D. Johnson, Teaching Reading Comprehension (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978); and Harry Singer, "Active Comprehension: From Answering to Asking Questions," The Reading Teacher 31, no. 8 (1978): 901-908.

28. J. Jaap Tuinman, "Determining the Passage Dependency of Comprehension Questions in 5 Major Tests," Reading Research Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1973): 206-223.

29. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940).

Reprinted from American Educator, Fall 2013

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3. The Fog Scale (Gunning FOG Formula) is similar to the Flesch scale in that it compares syllables and sentence lengths. A Fog score of 5 is readable, 10 is hard, 15 is difficult, and 20 is very difficult. Based on its name, 'Foggy' words are words that contain 3 or more syllables.

4. The SMOG Index outputs a U.S. school grade level; this indicates the average student in that grade level can read the text. For example, a score of 7.4 indicates that the text is understood by an average student in 7th grade.

5. The Coleman-Liau Index relies on characters instead of syllables per word and sentence length. This formula will output a grade. For example, 10.6 means your text is appropriate for a 10-11th grade high school student.

6. Automated Readability Index outputs a number which approximates the grade level needed to comprehend the text. For example, if the ARI outputs the number 3, it means students in 3rd grade (ages 8-9 yrs. old) should be able to comprehend the text.

7. Linsear Write Formula is a readability formula for English text, originally developed for the United States Air Force to help them calculate the readability of their technical manuals. Linsear Write Formula is specifically designed to calculate the United States grade level of a text sample based on sentence length and the number words used that have three or more syllables.

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AUTOMATIC READABILITY CHECKER, a Free Readability Formula Consensus Calculator

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Automatically grade your text with our free readability test tools! These 7 popular readability formulas will help you find the reading level and grade level of your materials and help you determine if your readers can read your materials.

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Good for editing, not so great for readability statistics.

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Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear.

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Readability scores are a way to measure whether written information is likely to be understood by the intended reader.

Text that scores a readability grade level of 8 or better (8 or below) will be readable by around 85% of the general public.

Readable supports several different readability formulas, but if you are not sure where to start then the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is a good, all-purpose algorithm.

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Measure the Readability of Text - Text Analysis Tools - Unique readability tools to improve your writing! App.readable.com

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Readability scores are a way to measure whether written information is likely to be understood by the intended reader. Text that scores a readability grade level of 8 or better (8 or below) will be readable by around 85% of the general public.

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From our beginning in 2000, TextProject has supported teachers with research and practical advice about how to provide readers the right kinds of texts, with special focus on text complexity. Now, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represents the first time that a standards document has paid special attention to text complexity, as Standard 10 is devoted specifically to increasing students' capacity with complex text from grades 2 through 12. To support reading skills needed for college and career success as of high school graduation, the CCSS proposes a staircase of text complexity.

To help teachers, whether veterans or candidates for certification, acquire the knowledge and skills needed to make the most of the new CCSS standards, TextProject introduces our first-ever product line aimed at teacher education and professional development environments. The TextProject Teacher Development Series on Text Complexity and the Common Core State Standards is a series of five modular lessons, each with guidance for teacher leaders, teacher educators or staff development leaders as well as activities for teachers.

Each module's theme is developed through three categories of activities:

Read and Learn

Foundational readings and purpose-setting questions to provide essential knowledge and guide further exploration

Reflect and Respond

Activities that facilitate an in-depth understanding of the core material, by answering purpose-setting questions and working with colleagues to discover nuances in the concepts presented in the foundational readings

Analyze and Apply

Hands-on activities that enable teachers to work directly with texts, including exemplars proposed in the CCSS, to analyze aspects of text complexity and gain confidence examining other texts for text complexity

Developed by veteran teacher educators Dana L. Grisham and Thomas DeVere Wolsey in conjunction with TextProject's Elfrieda H. Hiebert, the TextProject Teacher Development Series in Text Complexity and the Common Core State Standards includes modules for teacher educators and teacher candidates, plus foundational and supplemental readings, all available for free download from the TextProject website.

Note: The instructor edition for each module features margin notes of special interest to instructors (with additional content or activity notes), but is otherwise identical to the participant edition.

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The TextProject Teacher Development Series on Text Complexity and the Common Core State Standards is a series of five modular lessons, each with guidance for teacher leaders, teacher educators or s...

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Quick reference chart for converting leveling systems such as Lexile and Flesch-Kincaid into CCR grade bands.

Step-by-step guide to accessing free, online tools that help identify the appropriate grade band for a text.

SCASS Rubric for Informational Text SCASS Rubric for Literature
Qualitative Dimensions of Text Complexity Chart: Scales for evaluating the qualitative features of text complexity: text structure, language clarity and conventions, knowledge demands, and levels of meaning/purpose

Grade 11-CCR Sample Qualitative Scale
Example of completed qualitative scale for the 9-10 band.
Companion to Qualitative Scales
Detailed explanation of qualitative features; to be consulted in filling out the qualitative scale.

Grade 11-CCR Sample Qualitative Scale
Example of completed qualitative scale for the 9-10 band.
Companion to Qualitative Scales
Detailed explanation of qualitative features; to be consulted in filling out the qualitative scale.

Use this guide to support the analysis of a text for complexity.
Read Aloud for Grades K-2

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Quick reference chart for converting leveling systems such as Lexile and Flesch-Kincaid into CCR grade bands. Step-by-step guide to accessing free, online tools that help identify the appropriate grade band for a text.

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Should we match texts to students' reading levels?

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Should we match texts to students' reading levels?

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Should we match texts to students' reading levels?

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Instructional Equity with Zaretta Hammond

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Instructional Equity with Zaretta Hammond

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A Conversation About Instructional Equity with Zaretta Hammond

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Collaborative Classroom board member Zaretta Hammond shares her insights about instructional equity, the importance of distinguishing between multicultural education, social justice education, and culturally responsive education, and the "inequity by design" of our education system.

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Common Core Qualitative Rubric- Informational

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Common Core Qualitative Rubric- Informational

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Achieve the Core

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Text Complexity Grade Bands and Associated Ranges from Multiple Measures

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Text Complexity Grade Bands and Associated Ranges from Multiple Measures

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Achieve the Core

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NEW K-Z Bands of Text Complexity Illustrated Cards with Teacher Letter_TCRWP 2021-22.pdf