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Takeaways:
- reading achievement could be greater if we applied research evidence
- students with fewer resources are at greater risk for reading difficulty
- Simple View of Reading: word recognition and language comprehension combine for reading comprehension
-  these 2 skills are complex and comprised of sub-skills
- article calls for systematic research-based instruction, especially for readers who struggle
- teachers must: 1) know the basics of reading psychology and development 2) understand language structure 3) apply best practices and 4) use assessments to inform teaching
Conclusion:
Reading instruction is incredibly complex. As a teacher, it can often feel overwhelming to address all facets of literacy. I appreciate that the article points out the need for quality teacher education and professional development. If we have research to guide practice, we should be using it to help readers succeed.

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The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Because reading affects all other academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economic, and physical health, it has been the most researched aspect of human cognition. By the year 2000, after decades of multidisciplinary research, the scientific community had achieved broad consensus regarding these questions: How do children learn to read? What causes reading difficulties? What are the essential components of effective reading instruction and why is each important? How can we prevent or reduce reading difficulties? Two decades later, hundreds of additional studies have refined and consolidated what we know about bolstering reading achievement, especially for students at risk.

Scientists use increasingly sophisticated technology that can picture the brain's activation patterns or measure split-second reactions to speech or print. New statistical methods can document the complicated interactions of many factors as students develop reading skills. Fine-grained analyses illuminate the nature of individual differences and individual responses to instruction. These advanced investigative techniques have confirmed and extended the bedrock findings about reading and effective teaching of reading that were known 20 years ago. Evidence to guide our practices is stronger than it has ever been.

Unfortunately, much of this research is not yet included in teacher preparation programs, widely used curricula, or professional development, so it should come as no surprise that typical classroom practices often deviate substantially from what is recommended by our most credible sources. As a result, reading achievement is not as strong as it should be for most students, and the consequences are particularly dire for students from the least advantaged families and communities.

This we know: reading failure can be prevented in all but a small percentage of children with serious learning disorders. It is possible to teach most students how to read if we start early and follow the significant body of research showing which practices are most effective. Students living in poverty, students of color, and students who are eligible for remedial services can become competent readers-at any age. Persistent "gaps" between more advantaged and less advantaged students can be narrowed and even closed. Fundamentally, these gaps are the result of differences in students' opportunities to learn-not their learning abilities.

Although educators have long understood the importance of literacy, teaching children to read is very complex. Far too many children have trouble reading and writing. About 20 percent of elementary school students nationwide have serious problems learning to read; at least another 20 percent are at risk for not meeting grade-level expectations. ¹ For children growing up in underresourced communities and attending underresourced schools, the incidence of reading failure is astronomical and completely unacceptable. Students who are African American, Hispanic, learning English, and/or from impoverished homes fall behind and stay behind in far greater proportion than students who are white and middle class. The rate of weak reading skills in these groups is 60-70 percent, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. ²

The tragedy here is that most reading failure is unnecessary. We now know that classroom teaching itself, when it includes a range of research-based components and practices, can prevent and mitigate reading difficulty. Although home factors do influence how well and how soon students read, informed classroom instruction that targets specific language, cognitive, and reading skills beginning in kindergarten enhances success for all but a very small percentage of students with learning disabilities or severe dyslexia. Researchers now estimate that 95 percent of all children can be taught to read by the end of first grade, with future achievement constrained* only by students' reasoning and listening comprehension abilities. ³

While parents, tutors, and the community can contribute to reading success, classroom instruction is the critical factor in preventing reading problems and must be the primary focus for change. ⁴ To be clear: although the day-to-day work is teachers' responsibility, students' reading success is our shared responsibility. From preparation programs to standards and assessments to curricula and professional development, the policies and systems currently impacting how reading is taught need to improve-dramatically and rapidly. Teaching reading is rocket science. But it is also established science, with clear, specific, practical instructional strategies that all teachers should be taught and supported in using.

Research-Validated Ideas for Instruction

A well-validated concept that should underpin the design of instruction is called the Simple View of Reading. ⁵ It states that reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension. Without strong skills in either domain, an individual's reading comprehension will be compromised.

A reader's recognition of printed words must be accurate and automatic to support comprehension. The development of automatic word recognition depends on intact, proficient phoneme awareness, knowledge of sound-symbol (phoneme-grapheme) correspondences, recognition of print patterns such as recurring letter sequences and syllable spellings, and recognition of meaningful parts of words (morphemes). ⁶ Young readers progress by gradually learning each of these ways that our print system represents language, and then applying what they know during ample practice with both oral and silent reading. If reading skill is developing successfully, word recognition gradually becomes so fast that it seems as if we are reading "by sight." The path to that end, however, requires knowing how print represents sounds, syllables, and meaningful word parts; for most students, developing that body of knowledge requires explicit instruction and practice over several grades. ⁷ While some students seem to figure out how the print system works through incidental exposure, most do not.

Language comprehension, the other essential domain that underlies reading comprehension, depends on background knowledge, vocabulary, ability to decipher formal and complex sentence patterns, and recognition of the devices that hold a text together. ⁸ Furthermore, language comprehension is facilitated by metacognitive skills such as monitoring whether reading is making sense and choosing to act if it does not. The language comprehension factor in overall reading achievement becomes more and more important from about fourth grade onward. ⁹ From preschool through high school, students gain vital exposure to a variety of text forms, language patterns, background knowledge, and vocabulary both by listening to text read aloud and by reading itself.

The implications of the Simple View of Reading should be self-evident: reading and language arts instruction must include deliberate, systematic, and explicit teaching of word recognition and must develop students' subject-matter knowledge, vocabulary, sentence comprehension, and familiarity with the language in written texts. Each of these larger skill domains depends on the integrity of its subskills.

Learning to read is a complex achievement, and learning to teach reading requires extensive knowledge and skills across the components of word recognition, language comprehension, spelling, and writing. Consider what the classroom demands of the teacher. Children's interest in reading must be stimulated through regular exposure to interesting books and through discussions in which students respond to many kinds of texts. For best results, the teacher must instruct the majority of students directly, systematically, and explicitly to decipher words in print, all the while keeping in mind the ultimate purpose of reading, which is to learn, enjoy, and understand. To accommodate children's variability, the teacher must assess children and tailor lessons to individuals or groups. This includes interpreting errors, giving corrective feedback, selecting examples to illustrate concepts, explaining new ideas in several ways, and connecting word recognition instruction to meaningful reading and writing.

Some children learn language concepts and their application very easily in spite of incidental teaching, but others never learn unless they are taught in an organized, systematic, efficient way by a knowledgeable teacher using a well-designed instructional approach. Children of average ability might learn enough about reading to get by if their instruction is haphazard; with systematic research-based instruction, those students could achieve much more, such as the appreciation for language structure that supports learning words from context, perceiving subtle differences in meaning, or refining language use.

Toward a Curriculum on the Science of Reading

A core curriculum on effective literacy instruction for pre-service and in-service teacher education would, of course, be supplemented and honed over time, but its goal is to bring continuity, consistency, quality, and comprehensiveness to the many different programs, organizations, and systems through which aspiring and current teachers receive information about how to teach reading. Given the current science of reading, this core should be divided roughly into the following four areas:

1. Knowing the basics of reading psychology and development;

2. Understanding language structure for both word recognition and language comprehension;

3. Applying best practices in all components of reading instruction; and

4. Using validated, reliable, efficient assessments to inform classroom teaching.

This excerpt offers an introduction to the first two areas. For a detailed discussion of all four areas, please see the full report: www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Moats.pdf.

1. Reading Psychology and Development

Learning to read is not natural or easy for most children. Unlike spoken language, which is learned with almost any kind of contextual exposure, reading is an acquired skill. Although surrounding children with books will support reading development, and a "literature-rich environment" is highly desirable, it is not sufficient for learning to read. Neither will exposure to print ordinarily be sufficient for learning to spell, unless organized practice is provided. Thus, teachers must be reflective, knowledgeable, and intentional about the content they are teaching-that is, the symbol system (orthography) itself and its relationship to meaning.

Good readers do not skim and sample the text when they scan a line in a book. They process the letters of each word in detail, although they do so very rapidly and unconsciously. Those who comprehend well accomplish letter-wise text scanning with relative ease and fluency. When word identification is fast and accurate, a reader has ample mental energy to think over the meaning of the text. Knowledge of sound-symbol mapping is crucial in developing word recognition: the ability to sound out and recognize words accounts for about 80 percent of the variance in first-grade reading comprehension and continues to be a major (albeit diminishing) factor in text comprehension as students progress through the grades (and students' background knowledge and vocabulary become ever-larger factors in comprehending academic texts). ¹¹

The ability to sound out words is, in fact, a major underpinning that allows rapid recognition of words. (This recognition is so fast that some people mistakenly believe it is happening "by sight.") Before children can easily sound out or decode words, they must have at least an implicit awareness of the speech sounds that are represented by symbolic units (letters and their combinations). Children who learn to read well are sensitive to linguistic structure, recognize redundant patterns, and connect letter patterns with sounds, syllables, and meaningful word parts quickly, accurately, and unconsciously. Effective teaching of reading entails these concepts, presenting them in a sequence from simple and consistent to complex and variable.

The word-recognition component of reading is most closely dependent on the phonological aspect of language processing. ¹² Phonological language skills include awareness of bits of speech or linguistic elements within words: consonant and vowel phonemes, spoken syllables, grammatical endings, and meaningful word parts (morphemes). Awareness of these linguistic elements in spoken language is essential for making sense of print because our alphabetic writing system represents language at all these levels. When students cannot rapidly associate the sounds, syllables, and/or morphemes in spoken words with printed symbols, they will not be able to store words in their mental dictionaries. Conversely, a new word that is decoded accurately through phonological analysis can be pronounced and remembered, even if its meaning is not yet known.

Beginning reading instruction of necessity will focus on teaching students how to read and write words, following a systematic and logical sequence. When appropriate, the emphasis will shift to increasing reading volume. Combining research on reading, cognitive science related to the role of knowledge in thinking, and practice-based wisdom, it appears that opportunities for wide reading are best provided within a knowledge-building curriculum in which text readings are linked by a theme or topic. ¹³ Ironically, while background knowledge can be gained from reading, it is also true that those who already know more about a topic make better inferences and retain meanings better than those who know little about it. Therefore, reading practice should be linked to or embedded within the study of subjects including science, history, literature, and the arts. Interpretive strategies that facilitate comprehension-including summarizing, questioning, predicting outcomes, and monitoring one's own understanding-are best used in the service of learning defined curricular content. ¹⁴ Moreover, writing in response to reading is one of the best ways to enhance reading comprehension. ¹⁵

2. Language Structure

Expert teaching of reading requires knowledge of language structure at all levels. ¹⁶ Without such knowledge, teachers are not able to respond insightfully to student errors, choose examples for concepts, explain and contrast words and their parts, or judge what focus is needed in a lesson. The table below provides examples of key concepts of language structure and how they apply to instruction.
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Experts agree that children who initially are at risk for failure are saved, in most cases, by instruction that directly teaches the specific foundational language skills on which proficient reading depends. ¹⁷ Effective teachers of reading raise awareness and proficiency through every layer of language organization, including sounds, syllables, meaningful parts (morphemes), phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and various genres of text. Their teaching strategies are explicit, systematic, and engaging. ¹⁸ They also balance language skill instruction with its application to purposeful daily writing and reading, no matter what the skill level of the learner. Middle- and upper-grade children who are weak readers can be brought up to grade level with appropriate instruction (although the time, effort, and emotional strain for children and teachers involved is considerably greater than that required to teach younger children, so offering research-based instruction in the early grades must remain a top priority).

A rich and meaningful curriculum, in which students are exposed to a variety of texts as they learn concepts in science, literature, social studies, history, the arts, and culture, should provide the context for developing reading and writing skills. Comprehension strategies should not be taught in isolation but used as necessary to enhance understanding of text assigned for content learning. Useful comprehension strategies to embed in content reading include prediction of outcomes, summarizing, clarification, questioning, and visualization; these can be modeled explicitly by the teacher and practiced overtly if students are not comprehending well or if they approach reading comprehension passively. Vocabulary is best taught with a variety of complementary methods, both direct and incidental, designed to explore the relationships among words and the relationships among word structure, origin, and meaning. Of course, children also benefit from access to full libraries and incentives to read independently.

The fact that teachers need better preparation, professional development, and resources to carry out deliberate instruction in reading, spelling, and writing should prompt action rather than criticism. It should highlight the chronic gap between what teachers need and what they have been given. Just about all children can be taught to read and deserve no less from their teachers. Teachers, in turn, deserve no less than the knowledge, skills, and supported practice that will enable their teaching to succeed. There is no more important challenge for education to undertake.
Louisa C. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. After 15 years as a licensed psychologist specializing in evaluation and consultation with individuals who experienced reading, writing, and language difficulties, she served as a site director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Interventions Project and research advisor and consultant with Sopris Learning.
*It is important to note that students' reasoning and comprehension abilities can also be enhanced through informed instruction. As students' subject-matter knowledge and vocabulary grow, so will their capacity to think critically. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. R. H. Good, D. C. Simmons, and E. Kame'enui, "The Importance and Decision-Making Utility of a Continuum of Fluency-Based Indicators of Foundational Reading Skills for Third-Grade High-Stakes Outcomes," Scientific Studies of Reading 5 (2001): 257-288; and National Assessment of Educational Progress, "Nation's Report Card: How Did U.S. Students Perform on the Most Recent Assessments?," U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, www.nationsreportcard.gov.
2. National Assessment of Educational Progress, "Nation's Report Card."
3. D. A. Kilpatrick, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015); L. Lim et al., "Using the MULTILIT Literacy Instruction Program with Children Who Have Down Syndrome," Reading and Writing 32 (2019): 2179-2200; P. G. Mathes et al., "The Effects of Theoretically Different Instruction and Student Characteristics on the Skills of Struggling Readers," Reading Research Quarterly 40 (2005): 148-182; and J. K. Torgesen, "Avoiding the Devastating Downward Spiral: The Evidence That Early Intervention Prevents Reading Failure," American Educator 28, no. 3 (2004): 6-9, 12-13, 17-19, 45-47.
4. B. Foorman et al., Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2016), https://whatworks.ed.gov; and B. Foorman et al., "The Impact of Instructional Practices in Grades 1 and 2 on Reading and Spelling Achievement in High Poverty Schools," Contemporary Educational Psychology 31 (2006): 1-29.
5. H. W. Catts, S. M. Adlof, and S. E. Weismer, "Language Deficits in Poor Comprehenders: A Case for the Simple View of Reading," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49, no. 2 (2006): 278-293; and P. Gough and W. E. Tunmer, "Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability," Remedial and Special Education 7, no. 1 (1986): 6-10.
6. L. Ehri, "Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning," Scientific Studies of Reading 18 (2014): 5-21; and Kilpatrick, Essentials of Assessing.
7. L. Ehri et al., "Systematic Phonics Instruction Helps Students Learn to Read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis," Review of Educational Research 71 (2001): 393-447.
8. K. Cain and J. Oakhill, eds., Children's Comprehension Problems in Oral and Written Language: A Cognitive Perspective (New York: Guilford, 2007); K. Nation, "Children's Reading Comprehension Difficulties," in The Science of Reading: A Handbook, ed. M. J. Snowling and C. Hulme (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 248-266; and J. Oakhill, K. Cain, and C. Elbro, Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2015).
9. F. R. Vellutino et al., "Components of Reading Ability: Multivariate Evidence for a Convergent Skills Model of Reading Development," Scientific Studies of Reading 11, no. 1 (2007): 3-32.
10. R. Allington, "What Really Matters When Working with Struggling Readers," The Reading Teacher 66, no. 7 (2013): 520-530; and F. Smith, Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices: Flaws and Fallacies in "Scientific" Reading Instruction (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
11. C. Schatschneider et al., "Kindergarten Prediction of Reading Skills: A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis," Journal of Educational Psychology 96 (2004): 265-282; and Vellutino et al., "Components of Reading Ability."
12. S. Brady, "Efficacy of Phonics Teaching for Reading Outcomes: Implications from Post-NRP Research," in Explaining Individual Differences in Reading, ed. S. Brady, D. Braze, and C. Fowlers (London: Psychology Press, 2011), 69-96; S. Brady, "The 2003 IDA Definition of Dyslexia: A Call for Changes," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 45, no. 1 (2019): 15-21; A. Kjeldsen et al., "Gains from Training in Phonological Awareness in Kindergarten Predict Reading Comprehension in Grade 9," Scientific Studies of Reading 18, no. 6 (2014): 452-468; I. Y. Liberman, D. Shankweiler, and A. M. Liberman, "The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read," in Phonology and Reading Disability: Solving the Reading Puzzle, ed. D. Shankweiler and A. Liberman (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1989); and H. S. Scarborough and S. A. Brady, "Toward a Common Terminology for Talking about Speech and Reading: A Glossary of 'Phon' Words and Some Related Terms," Journal of Literacy Research 34, no. 3 (2002): 299-336.
13. E. D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2016); and N. Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-and How to Fix It (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019).
14. D. T. Willingham, "The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies," American Educator 30, no. 4 (Winter 2006-2007): 39-50.
15. S. Graham and M. Herbert, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2010).
16. L. C. Moats, Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing, 2020); C. Snow, P. Griffin, and S. Burns, Knowledge to Support Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2005); and E. K. Washburn, R. M. Joshi, and E. S. Binks-Cantrell, "Teacher Knowledge of Basic Language and Concepts and Dyslexia," Dyslexia 17 (2011): 165-183.
17. Moats, Speech to Print; L. Spear-Swerling, "Structured Literacy and Typical Literacy Practices: Understanding Differences to Create Instructional Opportunities," Teaching Exceptional Children 51 (2019): 201-211; and G. P. Wallach, S. Charlton, and J. C. Bartholomew, "The Spoken-Written Comprehension Connection: Constructive Intervention Strategies," in Handbook of Language and Literacy: Development and Disorders, ed. C. A. Stone et al. (New York: Guilford, 2014), 485-501.
18. A. L. Archer and C. A. Hughes, Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching (New York: Guilford, 2011); and Spear-Swerling, "Structured Literacy."

American Educator, Summer 2020

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The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. Because reading affects all other academic achievement and is associated with social, emotional, economic, and physical health, it has been the most researched aspect of human cognition.

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Takeaways:

- teens spend an average of only 6 minutes a day reading!

- rewards for reading can backfire

- praise can be better, but only if the child engages in reading on his/her own

- classroom displays emphasize finishing books rather than the act of reading

- rewards should be temporary and hopefully lead to reading for pleasure

- teachers can distinguish between academic and pleasure reading

- recommendations for pleasure reading: devote class time, offer choice with guidance, book access, sense of community, teacher is active

- technology has lowered our threshold for boredom and may cause children to think leisure activities should be instantly gratifying

- parents can appeal to the child's interests, make reading social, and help with access to books

- teachers can help parents by offering workshops, providing books, and promoting literacy whenever there is an opportunity

Conclusion:

This article made me think of Donalyn Miller's books: The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild. Many of my students do not begin intervention groups as engaged readers. They see reading as a chore, not a pleasure. For them, reading is a school task that is challenging. By supporting independent reading, I try to build their confidence and help them see that reading can be enjoyable. I follow many of Miller's suggestions in an attempt to accomplish this. Although I provide parents with information, I have never held a workshop. This is an idea I would like to explore with my colleagues.

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How should American teens spend their leisure time? I recently asked* American adults this question, after explaining that the typical teen enjoys approximately five hours of leisure time each weekday. ¹ The activity with the highest response, irrespective of race, education, and other demographic factors, was reading. Adults thought teens ought to spend about an hour and 15 minutes reading for pleasure each day.

How much time do teens actually spend reading? On average, six minutes. ²

What prompts a teen to choose reading over a different activity during her leisure time? Several factors would contribute, surely. Reading will hold little appeal if a student has trouble decoding or has problems with comprehension.

But what if a student is a fluent decoder and generally understands texts that she tackles? What if she just doesn't often choose to read? What might be done to motivate her, both at school and at home?

The Science of Rewards

In a nutshell, the problem of motivation is this: we want the student to do something we think is important, but she chooses not to do it. That is, of course, not an unusual problem in classrooms, and a potential motivator is some kind of negative consequence. A student who doesn't do the required work will receive low grades, or perhaps feel guilty for disappointing the teacher, or feel embarrassed should the failure become public. But by the time a student is in middle school, these blades have long lost their edge. Most unmotivated readers have the self-assurance to persuade themselves that reading is not all that important. Teachers and schools are not enthusiastic about punishment in any event, so many turn to rewards as motivators.

We want the student to read, and surely we want reading to be a positive experience. What if I offered a reward? Say I told a fourth-grader, "If you read that book, I'll give you an ice cream sundae!" The student might take me up on the deal, and he'd probably have a positive experience. So won't he then be motivated to read? It sounds so simple that it might be too good to be true.

Rewards do work, at least in the short term. If you find a reward that the student cares about, he will read in order to get it. But what we're really concerned about is his attitude toward reading; we want the student to read even if we're not around to dole out sundaes. Will the reward boost the reading attitude? Research indicates that the answer is probably no. In fact, the reward is likely to make the attitude less positive.

The classic experiment on this phenomenon was conducted in a preschool. ³ A set of attractive markers appeared during free play, and the researchers affirmed that children chose the markers from among many activities. Then the markers disappeared from the classroom. A few weeks later, researchers took children, one at a time, into a separate room. They offered some children a fancy "good player" certificate if they would draw with the markers. Other children were given the opportunity to draw with the markers but were not offered the certificate. After a few more weeks, the markers reappeared during free play in the classroom. The children who got the certificate showed notably less interest in the markers than the children who didn't get the certificate. The reward had backfired: it had made children like the markers less.

The interpretation of the study rests on how children think about their own behavior. The rewarded children likely thought, "I drew with the markers because I was offered a reward to do so. Now here are the markers but no reward. So why would I draw with them?" There have been many studies of rewards in school contexts, and they often backfire in this way. ⁴

We can imagine that rewarding children for reading could work as intended in certain circumstances. What if the child has such a positive experience while reading that it overwhelms his thinking that he's reading only for the reward? In other words, the child thinks, "Gosh, I started this book only to get that ice cream sundae, but actually it's awesome. My teacher was a sucker to offer me a sundae as a reward!" That's great when it does happen-and I think it can-but it means that rewards represent a risk. We're gambling that the book is going to be a big hit.

What about praise instead of a reward? Generally, praise is motivating to children: they will do more of whatever was praised. But praise can go wrong if it's overly controlling ("I'm so glad to see you reading. You really should do that every day.") or if the child thinks it's dishonest ("You are the best reader at school."). But if the praise seems like sincere appreciation, it's motivating. And one of the advantages of praise is that it lacks the downside of rewards. Rewards are usually set up in a bargain before the action: if you read, you'll get ice cream. Praise is generally spontaneous; you don't promise praise contingent on good behavior. That means that the praised child won't think, "I did that only to get the praise," the way the rewarded child thinks, "I did that only to get the reward." The praised child engages in the desired behavior of her own accord, and then the praise comes spontaneously. The problem is that the child must choose to read on her own before you get a chance to praise her.

Rewards in Practice

As I'm sure is clear by now, I'm not a big fan of school-based rewards for reading. That includes classroom displays of reading achievement-for example, posting on a bulletin board the number of books each student has read, or adding a segment of a class bookworm for each book. To my thinking, it puts too much emphasis on having read rather than on reading. Some students (I was one) will pick easy books to boost their "score." And as a way to recognize student achievement, it doesn't account for student differences; for some, getting through a book in a month may be a real accomplishment, yet they will feel inadequate compared with their peers. Some more formal programs, like Accelerated Reader and Pizza Hut's Book It, try to make up for some of the problems inherent in a reward system. Books are allocated different points based on difficulty, for example, or each student is assigned a personal, teacher-set reading target.

All in all, I think it's a mistake to be absolutist and say that rewards should never be used. Instead, I suggest they not be the first thing teachers try, and I want educators to be aware of the research literature on potential drawbacks. I know that some districts adapt Accelerated Reader or another program for their own use, ignoring the point system, for example. The research literature on Accelerated Reader in particular is, in fact, mixed. ⁵ Much appears to depend on how it is implemented.

Such programs bring to mind a conversation I had with a district administrator. Students in her schools come from very poor homes, and she told me that they do not grow up seeing their parents read. A benefactor started a program whereby children earn cash for reading books, and the administrator felt that it was helpful. Children had not been reading, the rewards got them started, and they discovered they really liked to read. I think it would be highhanded and naive to suggest that the district stop the program. In fact, this seems exactly the situation in which to try rewards: when you can't otherwise get a toehold, rewards offer a way to get children to at least try pleasure reading. Children may then discover that they like it, and even when the rewards stop, they keep going.

But if rewards are to be a last resort, what ought to be tried first?

Academic versus Pleasure Reading

Our goal is to encourage children to read so they can feel the pleasure of reading; rewards are meant to be a temporary incentive to start the process.

What if children don't need rewards? What if they already feel the pleasure of reading, but that feeling gets lost in less positive feelings-feelings created by the other demands of schoolwork? We expect students to feel the joy of reading when they get lost in a narrative or feel the pleasure of discovery when reading nonfiction. But as they move through elementary school and on to middle school, we add other purposes to reading. One purpose is learning: the student is expected to read a text and study it so that he can reproduce the information (e.g., on a quiz). A second purpose is to help complete a task-a project, say-which usually entails gathering information. A third purpose is to analyze how a text works-that is, how the author writes to make the reader laugh or cry. I'll use the umbrella term "academic reading" to contrast these purposes with pleasure reading.

My concern is that children might confuse academic reading with reading for pleasure. ⁶ If they do, they will come to think of reading as work, plain and simple. Sure, we'd like to think that academic reading is pleasurable, but in most schools, "pleasure" is not a litmus test. The student who tells the teacher, "I tried reading that photosynthesis stuff, but it was too boring," will not be told to find something else she'd prefer. Academic reading feels like work because it is work. But pleasure ought to be the litmus test for reading for pleasure.

I think it's a good idea for teachers to communicate these distinctions to students-not that "most of the reading we're doing is academic and therefore not fun," but that reading serves different purposes and that there is a distinction between academic reading and pleasure reading.

In some classrooms, pleasure reading is segregated from academic reading: we read because we love reading, and then we also learn how to work with texts. But the way pleasure reading is handled can still send a silent message to students that reading is work. Coercion sends that message. If a teacher makes pleasure reading a requirement (10 minutes per night, say) or demands accountability (by keeping a reading log, for example), she risks sending the message that reading is nothing students would do of their own accord.

Pleasure Reading in Class

Drawing a distinction between academic reading and pleasure reading will probably not be enough to get children actually reading. What else might be tried? Schools and teachers can strive to make reading expected and normal by devoting some proportion of class time to silent pleasure reading. Research shows that many reading programs don't actually allocate much time to reading. ⁷ Successful programs for silent classroom reading tend to have certain elements in common: ⁸

Students have adequate time set aside for reading; they need at least a 20-minute reading period to get into their books. Teachers set the duration dependent on their students' reading stamina (i.e., how long they can sustain attention).

Students freely choose what they read. Choice is enormously important for motivation,⁹ but there must be teacher guidance and teacher-set limits. Given the chance, some students will pick books that entail no reading at all. (As researcher Nell Duke ruefully noted, "independent reading time" too often turns into "independent find Waldo time.")¹⁰ Teachers must not only monitor text difficulty, but also ensure that students are exposed to a variety of genres.

Students have ready access to a good number of books.

Students have some opportunity to feel a sense of community through reading with book discussions, recommendations, and other sorts of activities that avid adult readers practice.

The teacher actively teaches during this time: fielding questions, helping students select books, and conferring with students. The alternative is that the teacher reads her own book at the same time as the students, with the idea that she's modeling what a good reader does. But students can't necessarily appreciate what she's doing. Teachers actually teaching during in-class reading time seems to be essential to student success. Some of the most careful experiments indicate that without this feature, students don't benefit from silent reading time in class.¹¹

Setting aside class time for silent pleasure reading seems to me the best way to engage a student who has no interest in reading. It offers the gentlest pressure that is still likely to work. Everyone else is reading, there's not much else to do, and a sharp-eyed teacher will notice those who are faking it. Freedom of choice also allows the greatest possibility that when the reluctant reader does give a book a try, he'll hit on something that he likes.

Given that I'm recommending this practice, you probably think there must be good research evidence that it's effective. In truth, I'd say the latest data indicate that it probably improves attitudes, vocabulary, and comprehension. ¹² Some studies show a positive effect, but some don't.

I think the squishiness of the findings is attributable to the difficulty of the teaching method. I'm sure classroom pleasure reading is easy to implement poorly: stick some books in the room, allocate some class time, and you're done. But the teacher's responsibilities when it's done well are heavy indeed. She must help students select books that they are likely to enjoy. That means really knowing each child, and a middle school teacher likely has more than 100 students. If a teacher is going to be able to confer with students about what they have read, she needs to have read the book herself. Hence, she needs comprehensive knowledge of the literature appropriate to the grade level. And although I've said that silent pleasure reading is a good way to gently persuade reluctant students to give reading a try, let's not pretend this is easy. A sixth-grader who believes that reading is boring has a pretty firm sense of herself as decidedly not a reader; a teacher must be a skilled psychologist to work around that attitude and help the student be open to reading.

Reading at Home

I've mentioned that students' reading responsibilities change at school in later elementary years. An important change at home is their greater access to and use of digital technologies. What impact do these have on how much children read and their attitudes toward reading?

Most of the parents I talk to are convinced that digital devices are having a profound and mostly negative impact on reading. The research on this issue is more limited than you might guess. We're predicting a long-term consequence of the use of digital technologies, but these technologies haven't been available all that long. That said, I think the digital age is having a negative effect on motivation, but not through the mechanism that most parents fear.

Concentration Lost

Teachers may think that students today are easily bored because of digital devices. ¹³ Why? Some observers-including prominent reading researcher Maryanne Wolf-have suggested that habitual web reading, characterized by bouncing from one topic to another and skimming rather than reading, changes the ability to read deeply. ¹⁴ Nick Carr popularized this sinister possibility with the question: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" ¹⁵ In that article (and in a follow-up book, The Shallows), Carr argued that something had happened to his brain. ¹⁶ Years of quick pivots in his thinking prompted by web surfing had left him unable to read a serious novel or long article. That does sound similar to the mental change many teachers believe they have seen in their students in the last decade or two; students can't pay attention, and teachers feel they must do a song and dance to engage them.

I doubt that reading on the web renders us unable to concentrate, and although a formal poll has not been taken, I suspect most cognitive psychologists agree. ¹⁷ Yes, video games and surfing the web change the brain. So does reading this article, singing a song, or seeing a stranger smile. The brain is adaptive, so it's always changing.

If the brain is adaptive, couldn't that mean that it would adapt to the need for constant shifts in attention and so maybe lose the ability to sustain attention to one thing? I don't think so, because the basic architecture of the mind probably can't be completely reshaped. Cognitive systems (vision, attention, memory, problem solving) are too interdependent for that. If one system changed in a fundamental way-such as losing the ability to stay focused on one thing-that change would cascade through the entire cognitive system, affecting most or all aspects of thought. A shorter attention span would not only affect reading, it would affect our ability to reason or solve problems, for example. The brain is probably too conservative in its adaptability for that to happen.

More important, I don't know of any good evidence that young people are worse at sustaining attention than their parents were at their age. Teens can sustain attention through a three-hour movie like The Hobbit. They are capable of reading a novel they enjoy, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. So I doubt that they can't sustain attention. But being able to sustain attention is no guarantee that they'll do so. They must deem something worthy of their attention, and that is where digital technologies may have their impact: they change expectations.

"I'm Bored. Fix It."

Despite the diversity of activities that digital technologies afford, many share two characteristics. First, whatever experience the technology offers, you get it immediately. Second, producing this experience requires minimal effort. For example, if you don't like the YouTube video you're watching, you can switch to another. In fact, the website makes it simple by displaying a list of suggestions. If you get tired of videos, you can check Facebook. If that's boring, look for something funny on TheOnion.com.

Watching television offers the same feature: channels abound on cable, but if nothing appeals, pick something from Netflix. If you have a smartphone-and about 80 percent of teens do-then all these amusements are with you all the time. ¹⁸

The consequence of long-term experience with digital technologies is not an inability to sustain attention. It's impatience with boredom. It's an expectation that I should always have something interesting to watch, read, or listen to, and that creating an interesting experience should require little effort. The mind-boggling availability of experiences afforded by digital technologies means there is always something right at hand that one might do. Unless we're really engrossed, we have the continuous, nagging suspicion that "there must be a better way to spend my time than this." That's why, when a friend sends a link to a video titled "Dog goes crazy over sprinkler-FUNNY!" I find myself impatient if it's not funny within the first 10 seconds.

In other words, we're not distractible. We just have a very low threshold for boredom.

And this low threshold is not due to long-term changes in the brain. It's due to beliefs-beliefs about what is worthy of sustained attention and what brings rewarding experiences. Beliefs are difficult to change, but they can be changed.

The Displacements

There's no time for reading! This idea is not new. It's called the displacement hypothesis, and though it comes in several varieties, the basic idea is that when a new activity (like browsing the web) becomes available, it takes the place of something else we have typically done (like reading). Evaluating whether that's true is tricky because lots of factors go into our choices. For example, if you simply ask, "Does television displace reading?" you're expecting a negative correlation: people who watch more TV read less, and people who watch less TV read more. But research shows that the wealthier you are, the more leisure time you have. So even if television does bite into reading time, we may not see the data pattern we expect because both activities are facilitated by free time.

So has reading been displaced by digital technologies? On balance, the answer seems to be no, although most of the research in this country has focused on adults, not children. ¹⁹ Researchers have examined correlations between time spent on the Internet and time spent reading, statistically controlling for other variables like overall amount of leisure time. The correlation in most studies seems to be nil or slightly positive (in the direction opposite that predicted by the displacement hypothesis). Research on television viewing does indicate that heavy viewing (more than four hours each day) is associated with less reading. ²⁰

Given the enormous amount of time devoted to digital technologies, how is it possible that children don't shove reading aside? One answer is that most people read so little, there isn't much to be shoved aside. In 1999, when they had virtually no access to digital technologies (outside of gaming), children (ages 8 to 18) spent an average of just 21 minutes per day reading books. In 2009, when access was much greater, they averaged 25 minutes. ²¹ These data are a little deceptive, however, because they are averages. It's not that every child in 1999 read for about 21 minutes. Rather, some read quite a bit and some (about 50 percent) didn't read at all. So for half of kids, there was no chance for digital technologies to displace reading.

For the kids in 1999 who did read, it may be that reading provided a sort of pleasure that digital technologies didn't replace. They liked the fun that digital technologies provide, but it was a different sort of fun than they got from reading. Notably, magazine and newspaper reading did drop during the decade that followed, arguably because that sort of reading can be done on the Internet.

I'm offering a mixed message. Good news: I doubt digital activities are "changing children's brains" in a scary way, and I don't think they soak up reading time. Bad news: they are leading children to expect full-time amusement, and for some, reading time isn't soaked up only because there's little to soak up. It's already dry as a sun-bleached saltine.

Which leads to a rather glum conclusion: most children don't read, and even if digital devices aren't directly absorbing time that might otherwise be devoted to reading, they might be making children expect instant gratification from leisure activities. But don't despair. Parents and teachers can take positive steps that might even tempt a sulky teen to read.

How Parents Can Help

A lot of students mistakenly believe that reading means books written by dead people who have nothing to say that would be relevant to a teen's life. Nevertheless, students are expected to pore over these authors' words, study them, summarize them, analyze them for hidden meaning, and then write a five-page paper about them. To children, that's reading. It's not contemporary. It doesn't have characters a student can identify with. It's not nonfiction. It's not magazines or graphic novels.

If a student hates reading, what might tempt her to give it a try? One entry point is a book with a story she already knows, for example, a novelization of a movie she loved. Or perhaps a book of trivia and backstage gossip about a television show she enjoys. Or you might branch out by seeking a book with less familiar content but related to her interests. For example, my niece (along with millions of other teens) got interested in forensic science through the television show CSI.

Parents should consider books that look fun. A thick book with small print looks intimidating to less-than-confident readers. Go for books that have short chapters or go for graphic novels, which look easy because of the pictures. (But be advised, many are challenging.) Children in their mid-to-late elementary school years might appreciate a collection of a comic strip they enjoy. And older kids may be interested in manga (pronounced mayn-ga), a variety of comic from Japan. Manga are published in just about every genre you can think of: adventure, mystery, horror, fantasy, and comedy, but note that mature themes (sexuality, violence) are not rare.

Another source to consider: websites like Wattpad and Figment. These operate a bit like social networking sites in that users "follow" people who post content. Users can also upvote (or "like") content and comment on it. On these sites, the content is fiction. Amateur writers post stories, hoping to gain an audience. Much of the content is aimed at teens and preteens, and people often serialize their content; they don't post an entire novel, but rather post a chapter at a time. These bite-size portions might appeal to a reluctant reader-3,000 words can be read on your phone during a bus ride.

Parents may object that this sort of reading material is poorly written and glorifies aspects of popular culture that they find distasteful. That's a judgment call, of course. I would not let my children read material that is misogynistic, racist, or the like. But if my teen avoided all reading, I would be fine with him reading "junk." Before he can develop taste, he must experience hunger. The first step is to open his mind to the idea that printed material is worth his time. I believe parents will further their own goals by showing curiosity about their children's interests rather than disdain. Taking your child seriously as a reader-by, for example, taking a reading recommendation from him-might make him take himself more seriously as a reader.

Use social connections. How do students learn about movies they want to see or video games they want to play? Through media advertising and their friends. Save a few highly successful series, there is no advertising for print material. It's all word of mouth, and most kids don't read.

Parents can try to correct this knowledge deficit directly by telling their children about content they think they'd like, but it would likely be more effective for students to hear these things from peers. For adults, reading is often social. Part of the success of Oprah Winfrey's book club is the feeling of being part of a group. Teens are hypersocial, so reading ought to be social for them as well.

Technology can help. There are countless book groups on the web-boards where kids discuss books, trade recommendations, post fan fiction, and the like. Booksellers offer online book reviews and discussions that are heavily populated (see www.amazon.com/forum/book and www.barnesandnoble.com/bookclubs). Social cataloging sites, such as www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult, www.shelfari.com, and www.librarything.com, allow users to comment on other people's posts, let others know what they read or plan to read, get recommendations, offer commentary, engage in discussions, and so on. Goodreads also allows the posting of pictures and animated GIFs, which teens do in abundance. And for serious readers, several websites offer reviews, blogs, author interviews, and other information that might provide a welcome home for teens who like reading but don't have friends who do. For example, see www.readergirlz.com, www.guyslitwire.com, and www.teenreads.com.

A child is not likely to dive into one of these communities. The most probable entry point would be through that rare book that does capture her imagination; that's the moment parents should make sure she knows that there are websites where other enthusiasts are discussing the book.

Make it easy to access books. Will an electronic reader help motivation? There are a few scattered studies on this question, showing mixed results. ²² Honestly, I'd be surprised if an e-reader made books appealing to a child who hates reading. Pleasure reading is just not that different on an e-reader, and when asked, students say they actually prefer paper; 80 percent who have experience with e-books say they still read print more often. ²³

Yet these same students say they think they would read more if they had access to e-books, and I tend to believe them. I don't think e-readers make reading more fun, once the device has lost its gee-whiz luster, but an e-reader improves access. Being able to download virtually any book you want as soon as you want it (barring cost considerations) is a great advantage. If a child has just finished book two of a trilogy and is eager to read the final book, or he has just heard from a friend about a fantastic new title, that's when he's most excited to get it. But if he has to wait a few days to get to a bookstore or library, his interest may have moved on to something new. Older students can download an e-reader for their phones. It's free, and that way they can always have a book with them.

What Teachers Can Do

A friend of mine works for a program that provides information and services to low-income parents. My friend told me of a young mother saying that she appreciated the books the group had provided for read-alouds and wondered if she could have more. My friend was pleased but surprised, as the mother had already received a large number of books. As they chatted, it became clear that the mother had been discarding each book after her child had heard it once. She didn't know it was permissible (let alone desirable) for her child to hear the same book more than once.

You may have students in your class who have parents like this mother: they want to do the right thing but need a lot of help, down to details of execution that others take for granted. Teachers also tell me of parents who are less open to the idea of a central place for reading in their homes. They did not grow up in reading homes, and they feel that they turned out just fine. Or they like the idea in principle but are not confident about their own reading. What can teachers do to promote reading in children with parents who don't know how to support it or perhaps aren't eager to do so? I can offer three suggestions.

Offer parent workshops. Research shows that telling parents about research-based practices in reading does lead to improvement in children's reading. ²⁴ A team of teachers might develop workshops that:

Offer information about the impact of parents' attitudes on children's success. Even though literacy is important to a child's success in school, reading at home should focus on pleasure. Teachers should teach; parents don't need to. Parents should support reading as a gateway to pleasure. Research shows that parents who view reading as fun actually have kids who read better than parents who view reading as an academic skill.²⁵

Offer information about how to read to a young child: how to fit it into one's day, what to do when the child is fidgety, how to find interesting books, and so on. For parents of older kids, provide information about how to support the emergent reader: when to offer support and of what sort, how long the child should read, and what sort of material he should read.

Offer information about how to include more reading in daily life-for example, encouraging the child to bring a book for the ride to school-and suggestions for ways to reduce television watching and video gaming.

If workshops are to have an impact, parents must attend, so organizers might consider ways to make it as easy as possible for parents to do so. In addition to good publicity, strategies might include providing childcare, holding the workshop on the first floor so parents with strollers aren't thwarted, and scheduling with sensitivity to working hours (or better, scheduling the same workshop at different times). Organizers might also consider an initial parent-child event that has nothing to do with reading at all but is meant only to establish the school as a welcoming place. I visited a school that held a mother-daughter nail-art night for this purpose.

Provide books. Suppose you simply gave kids free books? Would they read them, and would their reading improve? Research on the impact of free-book programs has typically focused on the summer months because that's when kids who don't read really fall behind those who do. ²⁶ It's a special problem for low-income kids, ²⁷ as they don't have the access to books (either at home or at libraries) that wealthier children do. ²⁸ Summer school programs meant to encourage kids to read at home are known to be effective, ²⁹ but they are expensive.

The less expensive alternative is to provide books and hope for the best, and there is some indication that doing so does prompt reading and, in turn, boosts reading skills. ³⁰ As you might guess, free-book programs seem to have a bigger impact on low-income kids than middle-income kids. ³¹

A number of organizations provide free books to children in need (see the "Resources" box on the right). A small team of teachers might take on the task of contacting these organizations to procure books that can be distributed directly to students.

Plant a seed. Even if parents won't come for a workshop, you can still use the brief snippets of time you have with them to try to plant a literacy seed: if they come for a parent-teacher conference, great, but if not, perhaps it's an opportune moment at pickup when the child is struggling into his jacket. What might such a seed be? If parents seem very reluctant to accord a larger role for literacy, a greater emphasis on conversation at home may lay the groundwork for literacy later.

Much has been written about the importance of talking to children, but the dictate "talk to your kids" says nothing about the quality of the speech. Child-directed talk composed mostly of directions (e.g., "Go get me the milk") or prohibitions (e.g., "Stop that") is not what we have in mind, but that may be what the child receives if a parent sees conversation with children as frivolous. A way around this is to suggest that parents share with their children stories of their own childhood. Stories provide structure for extended talk that is social, family-oriented, and not directive. From about age 5 until pubescence (and sometimes into the teen years), children often enjoy hearing stories that verify the remarkable fact that their parents were once young.

Another option is to suggest that parents ask their child questions. Hearing adult speech is a useful model, but the child also needs practice in formulating and expressing her ideas. In addition, asking questions sends an important implicit message about the nature of speech. The parent who uses speech mostly to tell his child what to do silently communicates to the child that the purpose of language is to make one's wishes known to others. The parent who asks questions shows that another purpose of language is to gain new information, to learn things from others. ³² It's a way to model curiosity.

A natural topic for questions is what happened during the school day. Teachers can help by letting parents know when a student was particularly excited about some work during the day, and suggesting that the parent ask about it. For willing parents, a teacher could even arrange to make such communications regular, for example, by sending a text message every few days that tells parents something about classroom life that they could ask their children about: which book was read aloud, for example, or what the writing prompt was that day.

* * *

What parents and teachers really want for children is to experience reading pleasure. What sort of reading pleasure? For me, reading affords a pleasure of understanding. Food writer Ruth Reichl, for example, can snare in words the elusive subtleties in the flavor of toro. Other writers make me understand things about myself, not always appealing things. After reading the memoir Clear Pictures, I remember reflecting on how lucky Reynolds Price was to have grown up among such wise and interesting people, only to realize that it was Price's acumen and sensitivity that made them so; had I known them, I would likely have missed their finest qualities. As an adult, I get great satisfaction from, at long last, coming to a better understanding of ideas that I've often encountered but only dimly comprehended; most recently, it's been the tensions among the founders of the United States.

An altogether different sort of pleasure comes from being carried to distant times and places when I read. How better to see the French Riviera during the 1920s than through the debauched, exhausted eyes of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night? How could I enter the alternately solemn and boisterous world of New York's Hasidim if Chaim Potok did not take me there? And then too sometimes the pleasure lies not in the charms of a new world but in escape from my own. During graduate school, I read Herman Wouk's two-volume World War II epic The Winds of War and War and Remembrance nearly daily at lunch; I used it like worry beads to manage the anxiety consequent to my demanding academic program.

I maintain that these joys cannot be experienced through television or other media. Only reading elicits your contribution to the experience by demanding that you mentally create the world described. Only fiction demands that you live with the characters as long or as deeply. And with few exceptions, prose stylists show greater love of language than artists in other media.

I want my children-and yours-to experience those joys, or ones like them. And that's the goal you must keep in the forefront of your mind. As someone who has spent all of his professional life around 18- to 22-year-olds, I'll offer my impression as to what causes the greatest conflict between parents and teens: Parents are under the impression that they want their children to be happy. Children are under the impression that their parents want them to be happy the way their parents think they ought to be happy.

The danger lies in children feeling pressured and unhappy about reading. Remember that your goal is that they enjoy reading, not that they enjoy reading as you do.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education and Why Don't Students Like School? For his articles on education, go to www.danielwillingham.com. This article is adapted with permission of the publisher from his most recent book, Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. Copyright 2015 Jossey-Bass/Wiley. All rights reserved.

*The survey was conducted on MTurk, a website where volunteers can perform brief computer tasks for pay. We paid each of our 313 participants (53.4 percent female, mean age = 35.2 years) 35 cents. All were Americans at least 18 years old. The instructions said, "The average American teenager between the ages of 15 and 19 has 5.1 hours of leisure time on a typical weekday. How would you hope that your child would allocate his or her 5.1 hours (that's 306 minutes) among the following activities? Enter the number of minutes in the box next to each activity." The wording varied so that respondents without a teenage child were asked to answer as if they did. ( back to the article)

†For more on the effectiveness of rewards, see " Should Learning Be Its Own Reward?" in the Winter 2007-2008 issue of American Educator. ( back to the article)

‡For more on the effects of praising students, see " How Praise Can Motivate-or Stifle" in the Winter 2005-2006 issue of American Educator. ( back to the article)

§For more about the word gap between low-income and more-affluent children, see " The Early Catastrophe" in the Spring 2003 issue of American Educator. ( back to the article)

Endnotes

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "American Time Use Survey-2013 Results," news release, June 18, 2014, www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf.

2. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "American Time Use Survey."

3. Mark R. Lepper, David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett, "Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the 'Overjustification Hypothesis,'" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28, no. 1 (1973): 129-137.

4. For a review, see Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard M. Ryan, "A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation," Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 627-668.

5. Laurie E. Hansen, Penny Collins, and Mark Warschauer, "Reading Management Programs: A Review of the Research," Journal of Literacy and Technology 10, no. 3 (2009): 55-80.

6. Kelly Gallagher, Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It (Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2009).

7. Devon Brenner, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, and Renarta Tompkins, "How Much and What Are Third Graders Reading?," in Reading More, Reading Better, ed. Elfrieda. H. Hiebert (New York: Guilford Press, 2009), 118-140.

8. Emily A. Swan, Cassandra S. Coddington, and John T. Guthrie, "Engaged Silent Reading," in Revisiting Silent Reading: New Directions for Teachers and Researchers, ed. Elfrieda H. Hiebert and D. Ray Reutzel (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2010), 95-111.

9. John T. Guthrie and Allan Wigfield, "Engagement and Motivation in Reading," in Handbook of Reading Research, ed. Michael L. Kamil, Peter B. Mosenthal, P. David Pearson, and Rebecca Barr, vol. 3 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 403-422; and Gay Ivey and Karen Broaddus, "'Just Plain Reading': A Survey of What Makes Students Want to Read in Middle School Classrooms," Reading Research Quarterly 36 (2001): 350-377.

10. Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss, No More Independent Reading without Support (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2013).

11. Michael L. Kamil, "How to Get Recreational Reading to Increase Reading Achievement," in 57th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, ed. Youb Kim et al. (Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference, 2008), 31-40.

12. Maryann Manning and Marta Lewis, "Sustained Silent Reading: An Update of the Research," in Hiebert and Reutzel, Revisiting Silent Reading, 112-128; D. Ray Reutzel, Yaacov Petscher, and Alexandra N. Spichtig, "Exploring the Value Added of a Guided, Silent Reading Intervention: Effects on Struggling Third-Grade Readers' Achievement," Journal of Educational Research 105 (2012): 404-415; Jun-Chae Yoon, "Three Decades of Sustained Silent Reading: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of SSR on Attitude toward Reading," Reading Improvement 39, no. 4 (2002): 186-195; and National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction; Reports of the Subgroups (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

13. Matt Richtel, "Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say," New York Times, November 1, 2012.

14. Michael S. Rosenwald, "Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Scanning and Skimming, Researchers Say," Washington Post, April 6, 2014.

15. Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 107, no. 2 (2008): 89-94.

16. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

17. Kathryn L. Mills, "Effects of Internet Use on the Adolescent Brain: Despite Popular Claims, Experimental Evidence Remains Scarce," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (2014): 385-387; Steven Pinker, "Mind over Mass Media," New York Times, June 10, 2010; and Roger Schank, "The Thinking Process Hasn't Changed in 50,000 Years," Edge.org, 2010, http://edge.org/responses/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think.

18. "The Mobile Device Path to Purchase: Parents & Children," Communicus, accessed November 14, 2014, www.communicus.com/2014/08/22/mobile-device-path-purchase-parents-child....

19. Kouider Mokhtari, Carla A. Reichard, and Anne Gardner, "The Impact of Internet and Television Use on the Reading Habits and Practices of College Students," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52 (2009): 609-619; John P. Robinson, "Arts and Leisure Participation among IT Users: Further Evidence of Time Enhancement over Time Displacement," Social Science Computer Review 29 (2011): 470-480; John P. Robinson and Steven Martin, "IT and Activity Displacement: Behavioral Evidence from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS)," Social Indicators Research 91 (2009): 115-139.

20. Cees M. Koolstra and Tom H. A. van der Voort, "Longitudinal Effects of Television on Children's Leisure-Time Reading: A Test of Three Explanatory Models," Human Communication Research 23 (1996): 4-35.

21. Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010).

22. Tricia A. Zucker, Amelia K. Moody, and Michael C. McKenna, "The Effects of Electronic Books on Pre-Kindergarten-to-Grade 5 Students' Literacy and Language Outcomes: A Research Synthesis," Journal of Educational Computing Research 40 (2009): 47-87.

23. Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report, 4th ed. (New York: Scholastic, 2013).

24. Jennifer Sloan McCombs, Catherine H. Augustine, Heather L. Schwartz, Susan J. Bodilly, Brian McInnis, Dahlia S. Lichter, and Amanda Brown Cross, Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children's Learning (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2011).

25. Linda Baker, "The Role of Parents in Motivating Struggling Readers," Reading and Writing Quarterly 19 (2003): 87-106.

26. James S. Kim and Thomas G. White, "Scaffolding Voluntary Summer Reading for Children in Grades 3 to 5: An Experimental Study," Scientific Studies of Reading 12 (2008): 1-23; and Joshua Fahey Lawrence, "Summer Reading: Predicting Adolescent Word Learning from Aptitude, Time Spent Reading, and Text Type," Reading Psychology 30 (2009): 445-465.

27. David T. Burkam, Douglas D. Ready, Valerie E. Lee, and Laura F. LoGerfo, "Social-Class Differences in Summer Learning Between Kindergarten and First Grade: Model Specification and Estimation," Sociology of Education 77 (2004): 1-31.

28. Susan B. Neuman and Donna Celano, "Access to Print in Low-Income and Middle-Income Communities: An Ecological Study of Four Neighborhoods," Reading Research Quarterly 36 (2001): 8-26.

29. Harris Cooper, Kelly Charlton, Jeff C. Valentine, and Laura Muhlenbruck, "Making the Most of Summer School: A Meta-Analytic and Narrative Review," Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 65, no. 1 (2000): 1-118.

30. Richard L. Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Gregory Camilli, Lunetta Williams, Jennifer Graff, Jacqueline Zeig, Courtney Zmach, and Rhonda Nowak, "Addressing Summer Reading Setback among Economically Disadvantaged Elementary Students," Reading Psychology 31 (2010): 411-427; James S. Kim, "Effects of a Voluntary Summer Reading Intervention on Reading Achievement: Results from a Randomized Field Trial," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 28 (2006): 335-355; and Susan B. Neuman, "Books Make a Difference: A Study of Access to Literacy," Reading Research Quarterly 34 (1999): 286-311.

31. James S. Kim and David M. Quinn, "The Effects of Summer Reading on Low-Income Children's Literacy Achievement from Kindergarten to Grade 8: A Meta-Analysis of Classroom and Home Interventions," Review of Educational Research 83 (2013): 386-431.

32. Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes, Young Children Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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How should American teens spend their leisure time? I recently asked* American adults this question, after explaining that the typical teen enjoys approximately five hours of leisure time each weekday.1 The activity with the highest response, irrespective of race, education, and other demographic factors, was reading. Adults thought teens ought to spend about an hour and 15 minutes reading for pleasure each day. How much time do teens actually spend reading? On average, six minutes.2

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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Takeaways:
- Fountas and Pinnell approach amended to sometimes move students up even when assessment does not show improvement so they do not get stuck at a certain level
- text level/readability based on vocabulary and sentence complexity and predicts comprehension, not progress
- F & P expanded to include 10 factors, and point out that leveling may not be completely accurate
- leveling creates a gradient and place for students, but does not determine from which texts they learn best
- Betts claimed three reading levels: independent, instructional, frustration
- Powell claimed some students could comprehend with higher levels of disfluency
- another study claims students learn more from frustration texts
- further research showed that students learned more from texts above their instructional level, however, teachers must facilitate this learning
- Common Core State Standards of 2010 led to purchase of harder texts, teachers saw students struggle and relied on instructional level texts to teach reading
- author proposes mixing in grade level texts and teaching students skills needed to navigate them
- students deserve the opportunity to learn from books at their grade level even if not their reading level
Conclusion:
This article was especially relevant for the grade levels that I teach - 4 to 6. Students are still developing comprehension skills, but also reading to learn new material. I agree that students must  work with a range of text levels. I believe that when students read independently, they need texts they can comprehend on their own. Teachers can help them build comprehension skills by guiding them through instructional level texts. And for grade level material, the teacher can facilitate learning for most students. When a student's independent level is significantly below grade level, however, I think modifications must be made. For example, a fifth grade student reading at a second grade level will struggle to learn from or feel success with grade level text. In these cases, teachers need to make instructional decisions based on goals for the student.

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

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

But how effective is such teaching? Does it work?

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

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

Teaching with Gradually More Difficult Texts

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

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

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

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

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

Determining Text Levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Levels That Promote Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A More Effective Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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

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Takeaways:
- reading paper books requires deep reading, whereas reading a screen uses "non-linear" reading
- reading on paper results in better retention
- reading on paper is better before bed to avoid blue light
- ebooks can benefit poor eyesight, reading disorders such as dyslexia, and language learners
- audiobooks can help those who struggle reading on paper and are more likely to allow the brain to create imagery
Conclusion:
Students today should be exposed to a variety of book types. Paper books are important for deep reading and retention, but ebooks and audiobooks can provide benefits for readers with unique needs.