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What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you’ll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren’t assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.

Children are reading significantly less challenging material in school every year. Read more or listen to the full report at NPR.

(via pacificstand)

From a blog post over at The Reading Zone about this study:

The study only tracks books students log for Accelerated Reader, a program that schools pay for.  And a program that ties students to a single reading level for the year (or semester).  Pre-test and post-test.  Not a lot of movement in between.  Want to try a more complex book?  Sorry!  That’s above your reading level!

Accelerated Reader is a carrot-and-stick program, a rewards based one that allots points for every book a child reads (after they take a ridiculous, low-level comprehension quiz). Schools and teachers provide the quizzes, after purchasing them, and tell students what level they should be reading.  Books are then leveled according to AR’s readability test.

Schools tend to assign students to a band of points they must earn in order to succeed.  For example, a reader at level J might need to earn 35-40 AR points per marking period.  Students are responsible for finding AR-leveled books, either at school or at their library.  They then take the quiz and earn the points.  It doesn’t take long for students to realize that the easier, low-level point books help them finish this inane assignment faster.  And for many students, their options are limited to the books and tests readily available to them at school.  This means a district must purchase the texts and the sets of comprehension quizzes in a day and age when budgets are tight and orders are hard to come by.  I have  students who tell me that their middle school library stopped ordered new books before they arrived there thanks to budget cuts.  As a result, they were limited to the books on the shelves for their AR points.  Not a lot of room for choice.

But that’s not even the worst part.  The study mentioned above notes that students in high school are reading books well below their “AR level”.  Accelerated Reader levels each text using the ATOS readability formula, which scans vocabulary and sentence complexity to assign a grade level.  Themes and content are not taken into account.

So why are we giving any weight to this study?  And it doesn’t even make any sense!  It bemoans students reading The Hunger Games because it’s rated at a 5th grade level and calls for them to read more Shakespeare and classics.  But then I pulled up classics, like Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and I had to laugh.  Reading level?  Fifth grade. The study decries the lack of rigor in student reading and calls for more classics, but then the lists of common 9-12 books show plenty of classics.  It’s clickbait and nothing more.  Get districts riled up and they will then turn to AR as a way to get kids reading.  Hmm, sounds like a great way to increase profits….

Interesting thoughts.

I went to the common core literacy pd put on by our district. Common core raises the bar. It says that students should be reading at higher lexile level than previously expected. I’ve see the Fountas and Pinnell charts that show what letter-grade equivalent each child should be at. From this year to last, a letter M is no longer a grade 3 letter, it’s a grade 2 letter (end of grade two).

There was some push back from teachers because they argued that younger students weren’t ready to read higher level text. They hadn’t developed the ability to understand the major themes and analyze them.

A big concern of mine is the developmentally appropriateness of the text.