A simple, powerful message about reading instruction.
Tim Shanahan’s new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, may be the reading book of the year. In fact, it may be the education book of the year.
The book makes a simple point: leveled reading instruction is a bad idea. It’s not that children can’t learn anything with such instruction. The problem is that it’s inefficient, and is suppressing potential reading achievement. The children who learn the least are the ones who most need instruction and support.
That sounds, indeed, like a simple point, one that might be covered in a blog. But those familiar with Shanahan’s blog posts know that he is never satisfied with a cursory review of evidence. There are very few researchers as steeped in the literature as he, and he puts his scholarship to work in this book.
Shanahan makes a persuasive case that leveled reading has been dominant in US classrooms for decades, and shows the mistaken theories of child development and of reading that gave rise to the practice. It also has its roots in, as he puts it, “well-meaning efforts to make education attractive by making it easy, and to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students.”
He also reviews the (sparser than you’d expect) research literature on leveled reading, and shows that the promised advantage of matching children to their instructional level does not materialize.
I had always thought that the notion of “levels” was incoherent, as it assumes that content is irrelevant. A child at level X is presumably a level-X reader for all texts, whereas in fact the match between the subject of the text and the reader’s background knowledge is a strong contributor to comprehension. Shanahan marshals several other reasons that levelled reading does not square with theories of reading, but the most telling for me is the most painfully obvious.
Well, obvious to me only after Shanahan pointed it out. We learn when we’re challenged. If you encourage children to read texts that they can read comfortably, you limit their exposure to complex language, new vocabulary, and rich content. Yes, these books are harder to read, but you address that problem via instruction and support, not by making the task easy enough to manage without being taught anything.
Chapters 6 through 9 of the book describe Shanahan’s evidence-based views on the best way to teach challenging texts, from prereading through decoding, fluency, and comprehension. There’s also a chapter on motivation—Shanahan recognizes that it’s harder to motivate children if you are asking them to read more challenging texts—as well as a useful section that answers common practical questions.
My hope is that every elementary teacher, every reading specialist, every SPED teacher, and every administrator will read this slim little volume. Scholarly though it is, Shanahan walks the reader through the argument with concise, accessible prose. And it’s simple, powerful message should be a central theme in US reading instruction.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, though I tried in this piece (inspired by Tim): From Play-doh to Plato: All students need to grapple with grade-level text https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/play-doh-plato-all-students-need-grapple-grade-level-text.
Thank you!
E.D Hirsch, Jr. beat Shanahan to it by a few years with the “readability” issue in his 1979 article in the Journal of Basic Writing, "Culture and Literacy" (which I’m sure you are familiar with). He includes it as an appendix in his latest book, The Ratchet Effect. Here is a pdf of the article. https://innovationtest1.colostate.edu/jbw/v3n1/hirsch.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExcXBNa09rSXZicGxyT2U4TAEenSCqLu5KZIBG_obx-_0FZut2NGl7xWjckDjOXtJQ_FkT9aD5LfUXATgj4d8_aem_b-7urZ0MPNBOjtSVlnHAuw
I hope that that a someone as “steeped in the literature” as Shanahan quoted Hirsch’s early debunking!
In The Ratchet Effect, Hirsch writes:
"Readability, word-novelty, or the length and construction of a sentence are significant psychologically only when the background knowledge needed for comprehension is already present. Readability makes a difference only to people who already possess the background knowledge required to understand the passage. Only then do complex syntax and word “levels” play a role in the actual readability of a text for an actual reader. In that case, the passage will take a bit longer to process, but it will still be understood. But when the needed background knowledge is absent, there’s NO difference in readability “levels” for an actual text, no matter the characteristics of the text. So, without somehow controlling for the actual relevant knowledge of the specific reader, readability is a pointless measure for deciding a text’s suitability for a child. Technical measures of word frequency and sentence length and sentence form are not descriptive of the psychological realities of the classroom nor sufficient for creating a useful and coherent curriculum.
The whole elaborate paraphernalia based on “readability” and “grade level” should be discarded by any forward-looking state and replaced with a specific grade-by grade topic sequence as a core that still leaves room for school choice among diverse materials that offer diverse treatments of the same topic sequence."
While Hirsch correctly (IMO) diagnoses the problem and prescribes the solution, I haven’t heard Shanahan be as clear and helpful, unfortunately. Sure, he encourages teachers to actually teach– a very important recommendation that I agree with. He acknowledges the role of background knowledge in his writing, and, in some of his blogs, he provides solid high level advice such as “make sure they read a lot in the content areas” and “don’t let reading blocks crowd out content”. But I’ve noticed in reading his blog, that he has often also minimized the role of knowledge in reading comprehension and seems somewhat confused by the topic. For example, he has emphasized that the evidence for the relationship between knowledge and reading comprehension is merely correlational, not causal. (I mean that’s accurate, I guess–in the same way the relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer is correlational).
In one of his blogs (from 2021, titled “Why doesn’t increasing knowledge improve reading comprehension”, he responds to a commenter who writes about the challenges of measuring comprehension with this reply:
“Frankly, most text is quite comprehensible without a lot of background knowledge. Background knowledge is used most often to reduce the amount of processing that is necessary. Authors tend to explain their points and define their terms. The reader who already knows some of these things is able to make sense of the text without relying heavily on working memory.
Tests by design typically try to reduce the amounts of background knowledge needed by the readers so that the test is more one of how well a reader can make sense of a text rather than of how much they know about their world.”
Huh?
As you have written and spoken about extensively, “Reading tests are really knowledge tests in disguise”, quite the contrary to Shanahan’s assertion.
And then there was his bizarre reaction to a study of the effect on reading comprehension measures of increased time spent on social studies as opposed to ELA. The authors of that study addressed his comments here: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/response-tim-shanahan-social-studies-instruction-and-reading-comprehension
Hirsch has been calling for the discarding of “the whole elaborate paraphernalia based on ‘readability’ and ‘grade-level’ for 44 years, but only a minority have heeded his call. Maybe more will listen to Shanahan when this book comes out? Still, I can’t help thinking that while it’s all well and good to “marshal several other reasons that levelled reading does not square with theories of reading”, unless Shanahan has found his way to crystal clarity on the fundamental non-negotiable of knowledge (and what to do about it), I question how helpful this “slim volume” can really be.