Leveling Up Reading Instruction

Our kids do not read well.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, approximately 30 percent of students read well below their grade levels—it varies a bit by age—and another 30 percent only demonstrate “partial mastery of the knowledge and skill that are fundamental for proficient work at a grade level.”¹

I do not want to mislead. Almost all our kids are learning to read. They are not, however, learning to read well enough to safeguard their access to opportunity in 21st-century America. How well they read will have a major influence on their eventual educational attainment,² family income levels,³ employment,⁴ health status,⁵ degree of social participation and civic involvement,⁶ and ability to avoid or prevent a plethora of social ills.⁷ Reading scores tick up or down from time to time (the COVID disaster has had a depressing impact). However, the most accurate broad characterization would be that achievement has languished for more than a half century. Generation Alpha reads neither appreciably better nor worse than the Baby Boomers.

After decades of reform initiatives, how can this be?

American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students learn best when they are taught with—and limited to—books they can already read well. The “instructional level” or “instructional reading level” is a theoretical construct meant to describe the appropriate student-text match that teachers should aim for so that learning will be maximized. The claim is that if students are taught with books at their supposed “instructional level,” then they will make the greatest learning progress.⁸ Teachers have been led to believe that this approach is research-based and that challenging students with harder books will be damaging: stultifying learning, imposing disfluency, and requiring word guessing rather than reading.⁹ These cautions have become so commonplace that, in my experience, most teachers are shocked to discover their flimsy evidentiary base.

What if teaching with such books does not improve learning? What if it offers no advantages while encumbering teachers with lots of testing duties and students with pejorative labels—segregating them and limiting their exposure to grade-level language or content? Even worse, what if the so-called instructional level holds kids back, suppressing learning and leading to other unfortunate consequences?

From Leveled Readers to Challenging Texts

Instructional-level theory holds that if students are to be successful learners, they must work with texts that they can already read with few errors (90 to 95 percent accuracy) and with at least 75 percent comprehension.* In addition, certain student-text matches are supposed to be advantageous for learning, students are thought to learn best when grouped with others at the same reading level, and limiting difficulty is claimed to be motivating.¹⁰

This approach constrains the amount of teaching by severely limiting the gap between what students can already do and what instructional-level texts necessitate. Differentiated instruction is achieved by assigning students to books of different levels, which is why so many students now are taught with below-grade texts.¹¹ The use of such books ensures that students will not be asked to deal with language complexity much beyond what they can already negotiate proficiently and limits the depth and complexity of content to which they will be exposed. Teaching with instructional-level books, according to proponents of this theory, is supposed to focus on guided reading practice, supplemented with a spoonful of vocabulary teaching, some practice answering questions thought to elicit certain cognitive responses, and instruction in cognitive strategies¹² (that are virtually useless with texts that do not challenge students). Student progress is gauged by the students’ steady march through the levels. Students are expected, for example, to work with level G texts until they can perform at the instructional level with level H books. That is what the theory recommends, but implementation is not so pristine, and research and practice have exposed a plethora of problems.

The instructional level was originally espoused to ensure that everyone learned, despite their individual differences. It does seem to do this; that is, most kids learn something when taught at their instructional level, but greater progress is possible with more challenging texts. For instance, a recent analysis of 27,814 American schools whose students enter below grade level reported that of these, only 1,345 schools managed to accomplish better than average learning gains. One of the distinguishing features of these champions? They teach English and math at grade level, rather than trying to reduce the curriculum to the students’ already low performance levels.¹³

It is time to bring reading instruction—text placement, curriculum design, differentiation, and classroom organization—more in line with empirical research findings concerning what works and the social demands of a pluralistic society. That means teaching most children with grade-level texts rather than trying to match books to their current reading levels—even when that would mean teaching many at their supposed frustration levels.

Teaching Reading with Challenging Texts

Students need to learn to read and comprehend texts—even complicated and difficult texts that they cannot easily grasp on a first attempt. To accomplish that, reading instruction must engage students in dealing with such text demands without telling them what the text says or reading it to them.

There is more to supporting reading comprehension than making sure students can recognize the words. Text, whether easy or challenging for a given student, includes both linguistic and conceptual information. The linguistic features of text require decoding and interpretive efforts, such as making sense of word meanings, sentence structure, cohesive relations, and discourse structure. The conceptual features are the ideas themselves. Some ideas are more familiar to students, and others pose a challenge because of students’ lack of relevant prior knowledge. Some ideas are more complex than others, and shallowness or depth of information—sparseness or extensiveness—play significant roles in promoting or preventing comprehension.

Also crucial for comprehension is that the information the author has coded into text includes affordances. Examples of affordances are things like precise diction, plain syntax, unambiguous cohesive links, explicit revelations of structure, repetition, symbolism in a literary novel, the relations between words and graphics in a science text, author efforts to explain concepts in ways likely to be understood by novices, and so on. Providing students with instructional-level texts limits their exposure to text affordances that they cannot already utilize or figure out largely on their own.¹⁴ The use of complex text for teaching reading brings those text affordances and all potential barriers to understanding them—such as word recognition or unfamiliar expository discourse features—to the forefront.

Texts that students cannot easily comprehend on their own present obvious opportunities for learning since any barrier to understanding can be a beneficial target of instruction. Unlike with instructional-level teaching, the idea is to make sure that students confront authentic barriers to comprehension, rather than avoiding them. Directed or guided reading is then aimed at helping students identify and surmount these barriers, ensuring comprehension through the students’ own actions.¹⁵ This instruction has two goals: to enable students to conquer a formidable text and to develop a set of insights, skills, strategies, and abilities that will allow them to read other such texts successfully on their own in the future.

The Basics of Teaching with Challenging Texts

There is not yet an extended body of research or teacher lore pertinent to the daily decisions that teaching with challenging texts requires. Existing research is sufficient for determining that exposure to more challenging texts is beneficial,¹⁶ but not for providing detailed guidance for the best ways to implement them. Accordingly, here I share a brief list of repurposed, well-studied approaches to facilitate student learning from grade-level text. I include some practical considerations for directed or guided reading lessons based on my five decades of experience, logic, and what I hope is intelligent guesswork. In the next section, I offer more detailed recommendations for comprehension supports for struggling readers.

1.  Read the texts ahead of time. Unless the teacher has already read the text the students are being asked to take on, it is nearly impossible to anticipate the problems students might have or what advice or direction should be provided to support learning. Unlike with instructional-level texts, comprehension can go far afield when students are struggling with a text. The teacher must be able to head off these problems before they capsize an entire lesson.

Start with identifying potential barriers to understanding the text features (or affordances) described above.¹⁷ It may help to take on one feature at a time. Your ability to spot these barriers will improve with experience. Then, when teaching these lessons, pay attention to how they turn out. There will be surprises both ways, features that cause unanticipated confusion, and those you thought would be barriers that turn out not to be. The simplest way to know for sure if the complexity of a particular feature is a barrier is to query students. Be ready to show them how to break down sentences and connect the ideas.

2.  Differentiate teaching, not curriculum. The instructional-level theory starts from the premise that some students should learn different things and that we must accept that many students won’t reach the same grade-level outcomes as their peers. This is, in essence, differentiation of the content. Differentiation of teaching is something else altogether. All students learn the same thing but not necessarily in the same way; teaching is altered to ensure success.¹⁸ A teacher, for instance, might seat some students nearer where she can reach them because of concerns about attention. Another example is the whole class lesson that gets through to some kids and not others; the teacher might pull some students aside for another run through—simplifying explanations or adding new examples—to make sure they all reach the intended outcome.

3.  Comprehension is essential—and enabled with support.¹⁹ Students benefit from taking on texts that they cannot initially read well but that they transform into ones they can comprehend through their own efforts. Research shows that the greater the disparity between reader and text, the more assistance and support will be necessary.²⁰ The scaffolds teachers provide must be instructive; their purpose is to help students comprehend the text at hand, but also to provide them with generalizable insights and actions that can be applied to other texts in the future.

Theoretically, no matter how hard a text, it can be successfully scaffolded so that there is no chasm between student and text that cannot be overcome. Practically, however, scaffolding someone to read a difficult text takes time in real classrooms with real kids. There can be gulfs too wide to bridge successfully with available resources. If fluency practice with the text is provided prior to the lesson, you might be able to guide students with even more challenging texts. The bigger the gaps, the more likely that fluency and word reading supports will be needed.

4.  Directed reading should include rereading. When a text is easy, readers can plumb its depths with a single read. However, when a text is difficult, it may be necessary to read it and reread it, or to reread key portions. Directed reading lessons need to include both returns to the text to address key affordances that students need to be conscious of as well as barriers that tripped them up and disrupted comprehension. It can also make sense—after the discussion—to go back and reread the whole text again. This should allow students to gain a fuller understanding and more coherent memory of the text content²¹—increasing learning while providing a more successful and coherent grade-level reading experience. Rereading can also lead to real satisfaction when students see how well they can now understand a challenging text.

5.  Monitoring success is critical. Teachers should be sensitive not only to students’ responses to the difficulty of text but also to incomprehension and miscomprehension. Questions should be used to reveal failures to comprehend, and each comprehension failure should elicit instruction, taking students back into the text to see if the problem can be solved and providing explanations for how to use context, make a connection, or generate a reasonable inference.²²

One way to monitor success is to evaluate student performance with rereading. Is their ability to handle those familiar texts improving? It can also be useful to evaluate performance with comparable grade-level texts that they have not yet tried. How are their fluency and comprehension with those? Sometimes later in the year, I like to take students back to an earlier text that presented a great challenge. Having them take another swing at such texts can make their progress especially apparent, while revisiting some barriers that may continue to interfere with their comprehension.

6.  Not all texts need to be at the same level. Students should learn to read grade-level text. That means that many students will need to read texts that are challenging for them. It should not mean that they read only such texts. Learning and development are best supported by a mix of easy and more challenging tasks.²³ Students need opportunities to consolidate their learning gains; switching among demanding texts that require a great deal of teacher scaffolding and simpler ones—including markedly easier ones—allows for such consolidation.²⁴ This variation in text difficulty also likely plays an important role in motivation, keeping kids’ heads in the game.

7.  Beginners do not need harder texts. When it comes to teaching students with challenging texts, there is no research with children earlier than second grade. That means there is no clear evidence that this is a good idea with beginning readers. Furthermore, there are strong theoretical reasons to suspect that young students may not be well served by especially hard texts.²⁵ The reason for this has to do with the role of decoding in reading. What makes texts difficult for beginners are not the linguistic or conceptual demands but the words and students’ ability to translate those from print to pronunciation.²⁶ Once students have mastered these basics, then more challenging texts can be beneficial.²⁷ (Of course, kindergartners and first-graders can still be challenged to enhance their comprehension abilities, but that should happen through shared reading—teachers reading books to children—and discussions, not through the texts these young students are trying to read.)

Supporting Struggling Readers

What of those students who can decode reasonably well but who still struggle to read the words in their textbooks? Teachers need to provide helpful support to ensure maximum progress. Study after study has demonstrated that teaching can facilitate students’ interactions with challenging texts. Specifically, the scaffolding a teacher provides can transform potential failure into pedagogical success. Teachers can convert frustration-level text into text that is appropriately challenging by providing explicit word reading support, including teaching sight vocabulary (words students learn to recognize without sounding out) and meaning vocabulary (words with different meanings in different contexts);²⁸ teaching strategies that improve reading fluency with the text (such as rereading);²⁹ and providing various comprehension scaffolds.³⁰

Unlike with the instructional-level approach, the assumption is not that students will make largely automatic gains from reading texts at a certain level, but that with instruction, grade-level texts will be productive.

Word Reading Supports

All students should spend time studying words and parts of words. The kind of explicit word instruction that makes the best sense during the upper elementary grades is an amalgam of morphology, spelling, and phonics.³¹ However, as valuable as such teaching can be, it is not likely to be sufficient to enable struggling students to read grade-level texts used in their daily lessons.

Teaching words from frustration-level texts is a crucial support for many students.³² Most reading programs encourage preteaching words with their main focus on explaining word meanings rather than supporting the students’ ability to read those new words. Research supports both teaching a wide array of grade-level vocabulary to improve reading comprehension generally³³ and selecting words from a specific text to teach prior to reading to enhance comprehension of that text.³⁴ At least one study showed this approach enabled students to comprehend texts that were significantly above grade level.³⁵

Preteaching challenging words may improve the readability of the text, but teaching students how to use context to resolve word meanings is also essential. Context instruction can have a positive impact on reading comprehension and can be well taught through guided practice with text.³⁶ Words that the author defines explicitly or that can be figured out from context should not be pretaught. Scaffolding challenging words may take the form of a demonstration that includes pointing out key information to help students grasp word meanings and encouraging rereading.

Oral Reading Fluency Training

Fluent readers are able to read text accurately, with automaticity (without conscious attention to word reading), and with prosody (reading that sounds like language with proper pausing and intonation). Guided oral reading practice with repetition and feedback can have a positive impact on reading fluency,³⁷ and gains are greatest when reading practice is with texts that students cannot already read fluently.³⁸ This improvement in fluency affects reading comprehension too.

There are several ways that fluency training can be implemented. The key is to provide this support with the grade-level texts from which the students are to be instructed. In two studies in which frustration-level texts paid off in more learning, students engaged in paired repeated reading, with the lower readers spending about 15 minutes per day reading text portions to their better-reading classmates, who provided feedback and support.³⁹ Many other studies provided both silent and oral repeated reading opportunities without feedback, and still others used choral reading or reading while listening to improve performance with the texts.⁴⁰ Personally, I tend to favor repeated reading but with close teacher supervision. The teacher monitors both the reading and the partnering by moving from pair to pair for observation and guidance.

Reading Comprehension

Because of the complexity of reading comprehension, the scaffolding provided during directed reading lessons must be responsive and varied. Consider just a few of the potential barriers that readers must negotiate to comprehend a text: sentence structure, text structure, and prior knowledge.

Texts with more complicated sentence structures are measurably harder to understand. However, even relatively simple sentence structures may be a problem for elementary school students, which argues for greater attention to sentence comprehension.⁴¹ Approaches that make sense for teaching students to translate frustrating sentences into comprehensible ones include sentence combining instruction,⁴² paraphrasing,⁴³ and sentence breaking (or parsing sentences into smaller chunks).⁴⁴ Sentence structure support should be provided during and after reading, rather than before, so that students face the challenge and accomplish what they can before receiving assistance.

The recognition of top-level organizational text structure plays an important role in comprehension and memory. Poor readers have difficulty identifying story structure; teaching students how text structure works and how to use story maps have been effective in improving comprehension.⁴⁵ Teachers can prepare students for reading a text by explaining what the structure of the text is, how it can be recognized, and why it matters—and demonstrating how to read such a text. Another possibility is to provide students with a story map or graphic organizer that guides the identification of key structural information. Scaffolding should include elaborated student feedback, providing not just the right answer, but showing students how to recognize and use the information to overcome barriers to comprehension.

Prior knowledge is used before and during reading, and scaffolds that encourage its use throughout the reading of challenging texts are a good idea. Dividing a text into shorter sections and then interleaving reading and discussion can accommodate accessing knowledge. After students read a portion, the teacher may ask relevant inferential questions that require students to fill in gaps or make connections. Knowledge building, which may be necessary when students lack relevant prior knowledge, can be scaffolded by having students read multiple texts on the same topic.⁴⁶ Such text sets may have a variety of readability levels; this allows students to scaffold their own comprehension by reading easier texts to increase knowledge, which renders the harder texts more readable.

A Note on Motivation

The instructional-level concept claims that there are particular levels of difficulty that will interfere with learning and lower the motivation or persistence of all students. However, research shows that individuals differ greatly in their ability to tolerate frustration.⁴⁷ While most students are likely to do well while being taught with grade-level texts, there are others who may react negatively. But negative impacts can be attenuated. If students find a text interesting, novel, or authentic, or if they have some choice in the matter, then difficulty does not matter or matters less.⁴⁸ Fostering adaptive, proactive behaviors, such as goal setting, also leads to fewer negative outcomes and greater resiliency. Relaxation exercises may help, too.⁴⁹ And, much as it is possible to scaffold students’ learning of words, fluency, and comprehension, it is possible to scaffold more appropriate emotional responses to frustration.⁵⁰ The following suggestions are not exhaustive but should go a long way toward providing students with a positive and nurturing learning environment.

1. Apprise students of the situation. If students think difficulty is due to task demands, they respond differently than if they attribute it to their own incompetency.⁵¹ Let students know that you are intentionally placing them in texts they will not already be able to read well, and that your purpose—through a series of lessons—is to enable them to do so.
2. Scaffold success. Match the amount and type of scaffolding to the circumstance. If students are struggling to read a text fluently, then teaching words and guiding repeated reading makes sense. Preview the texts to try to anticipate problems. Tailor comprehension questions to reveal likely failures to understand. When misunderstandings are uncovered, return to the text to guide students’ efforts to figure it out.
3. Foster improvement awareness. How we talk to students about what they are doing and the implications of their efforts matters.⁵² It can be useful to set aside time at the end of a lesson to have students appraise themselves and their progress. Consider asking, “What were you able to do with this text at the end that you couldn’t at the beginning?”

The idea of expecting students to read long, complex, unfamiliar texts is far from common in American reading instruction, which has more often tried to shield students from such experiences.⁵³ It is important to remember that while instructional-level teaching works in the sense that most students taught with books at their instructional level make some learning progress, it places severe limits on the literacy attainment of large numbers of students who would do better if taught with more demanding texts.

Instead of all the student testing aimed at determining reading levels, the management of leveled book collections, and the juggling of instructional groups, teacher efforts would better be expended on anticipating barriers to understanding, recognizing failures to comprehend, and guiding students to surmount these barriers. We must turn those comprehension failures into opportunities to learn. They should be the basis of our teaching. Such work is challenging, of course, but also particularly rewarding. It is more heartening to teach students to read better than to observe their reading practice with texts that allow little room for improvement.

It is time that we dedicate ourselves to ensuring that every child has the greatest opportunity to accomplish the highest levels of literacy. It is time to throw off the ideological cloak that claims that matching texts to student reading levels maximizes literacy, and to don new pedagogical garments more in line with a science of reading. Leveled reading instruction, indeed, levels lives.

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 the National Reading Panel. He writes about education at shanahanonliteracy.com. This article is excerpted with permission from Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students’ Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Shanahan, September 2025, published by Harvard Education Press. For more information, please visit here.

*To learn more about the history and research foundation of the instructional-level approach, see “Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read” in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2022 Reading Assessment (National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, 2022).

2. I. Kirsch et al., Adult Literacy in America, 3rd ed. (US Department of Education, 2002), nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf.

3. T. Krenzke et al., Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC): State and County Estimation Methodology Report (US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2020), nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020225.pdf; and J. Rothwell, Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States (Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, 2020), barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf.

4. A. Sum, Literacy in the Labor Force (US Department of Education, 1999), nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999470.pdf.

5. D. Dewalt and M. Pignone, “The Role of Literacy in Health and Health Care,” American Family Physician 72, no. 3 (August 2005): 387–88.

6. D. Kaplan and R. Venezky, Literacy and Voting Behavior: A Statistical Analysis Based on the 1985 Young Adult Literacy Survey (National Center on Adult Literacy, 1995), files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED378393.pdf; and Kirsch et al., Adult Literacy.

7. L. Collins Jr. et al., “State-Wise Variation in Teenage Birth Rates in the United States: Role of Teenage Birth Prevention Policies,” in Child and Adolescent Health Yearbook 2014, ed. J. Merrick (Nova Biomedical Books, 2015); Kirsch et al., Adult Literacy; Z. Nemati and H. Matlabi, “Assessing Behavioral Patterns of Internet Addiction and Drug Abuse Among High School Students,” Psychology Research and Behavior Management 10 (2017): 39–45; and M. Snowling et al., “Levels of Literacy Among Juvenile Offenders: The Incidence of Specific Reading Difficulties,” Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 10, no. 4 (2000): 229–41.

8. E. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction: With Emphasis on Differentiated Guidance (American Book Co., 1946); M. Clay, Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control (Heinemann, 1991); and I. Fountas and G. Pinnell, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children, 1st ed.(Heinemann, 1996).

9. For example, R. Allington, K. McCuiston, and M. Billen, “What Research Says About Text Complexity and Learning to Read,” Reading Teacher 68, no. 7 (2015): 491–501; and D. Morris et al., “Reading Instructional Level from a Print-Processing Perspective,” Reading & Writing Quarterly 35, no. 6 (2019): 556–71.

10. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction; Clay, Becoming Literate; Fountas and Pinnell, Guided Reading; and D. Morris, Diagnosis and Correction of Reading Problems, 2nd ed. (Guilford, 2014).

11. D. Griffith and A. Duffett, Reading and Writing Instruction in America’s Schools (Thomas Fordham Institute, 2018), files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED598894.pdf; J. Kaufman et al., What Teachers Know and Do in the Common Core Era: Findings from the 2015–2017 American Teacher Panel (RAND Corporation, 2018), rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10035.html; and T. Shanahan and A. Duffett, Common Core in the Schools: A First Look at Reading Assignments (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2013), edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2013/20131023-Common-Core-in-the-Schools-a-First-Look-at-Reading-Assignments/20131023-Common-Core-in-the-Schools-a-First-Look-at-Reading-Assignments-FINAL.pdf.

12. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction; and Fountas and Pinnell, Guided Reading.

13. The New Teacher Project (TNTP), “Paths of Opportunity: What It Will Take for All Young People to Thrive,” TNTP, August 8, 2024, tntp.org/publication/paths-of-opportunity; and J. Barshay, “The Habits of 7 Highly Effective Schools,” Hechinger Report, September 30, 2024, hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools.

14. Fountas and Pinnell, Guided Reading; and D. Morris et al., “Validating Craft Knowledge: An Empirical Examination of Elementary-Grade Students’ Performance on an Informal Reading Assessment,” Elementary School Journal 112, no. 2 (2011): 205–33.

15. E. Schorzman and E. Cheek, “Structured Strategy Instruction: Investigating an Intervention for Improving Sixth-Graders’ Reading Comprehension,” Reading Psychology, 25, no. 1 (2004): 37–60; and M. Schmitt, “The Effects of an Elaborated Directed Reading Activity on the Metacomprehension Skills of Third Graders,” National Reading Conference Yearbook 37 (1988): 167–81.

16. For example, D. McNamara et al., “Are Good Texts Always Better? Interactions of Text Coherence, Background Knowledge, and Levels of Understanding in Learning from Text,” Cognition and Instruction 14, no. 1 (1996): 1–43; S. Stahl and K. Heubach, “Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction,” Journal of Literacy Research 37, no. 1 (March 2005): 25–60; N. Stanley, “A Concurrent Validity Study of the Emergent Reading Level,” PhD diss. (University of Florida, 1986); 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): 113–19; and L. Brown et al., “The Effects of Dyad Reading and Text Difficulty on Third-Graders’ Reading Achievement,” Journal of Educational Research 111, no. 5 (2018): 541–53.

17. M. Flory, “Investigating Recommended Language Instruction of Complex Literary Texts: A Content Analysis of Close Reading Lesson Plans for Elementary Grades,” PhD diss. (Utah State University, 2021).

18. S. Hartl and C. Riley, “High-Quality Curriculum Is a Transformation Tool for Equity,” ASCD, March 25, 2021, ascd.org/el/articles/high-quality-curriculum-is-a-transformation-tool-for-equity; and A. Tatum, Teaching Black Boys in the Elementary Grades (Teachers College Press, 2021).

19. M. Filderman et al., “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions on the Reading Comprehension Outcomes of Struggling Readers in Third Through 12th Grades,” Exceptional Children 88, no. 2 (2022): 163–84.

20. S. Smith, “Will Raising the Bar Result in Greater Reading Growth?,” PhD diss. (Ball State University, 2019).

21. T. Griffin, J. Wiley, and K. Thiede, “Individual Differences, Rereading, and Self-Explanation: Concurrent Processing and Cue Validity as Constraints on Metacomprehension Accuracy,” Memory & Cognition 36, no.1 (2008): 93–103.

22. C. Connor, “A Lattice Model of the Development of Reading Comprehension,” Child Development Perspectives 10, no. 4 (2016): 269–74.

23. J. Bransford et al., “Anchored Instruction: Why We Need It and How Technology Can Help,” in Cognition, Education, and Multimedia, ed. D. Nix and R. Spiro (Erlbaum Associates, 1990), 111–28.

24. J. Hattie, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (Routledge, 2012).

25. E. Hiebert, “The Common Core’s Staircase of Text Complexity: Getting the Size of the First Step Right,” Reading Today 29, no. 3 (January 2012): 26–27.

26. M. Adams, “Decodable Text: Why, When, and How?,” in Finding the Right Texts: What Works for Beginning and Struggling Readers, ed. E. Hiebert and M. Sailors (Guilford Press, 2008), 23–46.

27. E. Hiebert, “Texts for Beginning Readers: The Search for Optimal Scaffolds,” in The Sage Handbook for Research in Education: Pursuing Ideas as the Keystone of Exemplary Inquiry, ed. C. Conrad and R. Serlin (Sage Publications, 2011), 413–28.

28. K. Wixson, “Vocabulary Instruction and Children’s Comprehension of Basal Stories,” Reading Research Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 317–29.

29. C. Young, S. Lagrone, and J. McCauley, “Read Like Me: An Intervention for Struggling Readers,” Education Sciences 10, no. 3 (March 2020): 57–68.

30. M. Burns, “Reading at the Instructional Level with Children Identified as Learning Disabled: Potential Implications for Response-to-Intervention,” School Psychology Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2007): 297–313.

31. J. Bowers and P. Bowers, “Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System,” Educational Psychologist 52, no. 2 (2017): 124–41; J. Carlisle, “Effects of Instruction in Morphological Awareness on Literacy Achievement: An Integrative Review,” Reading Research Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2010): 464–87; and D. Bear et al., Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (Pearson, 2020).

32. Burns, “Reading at the Instructional Level”; M. Burns, V. Dean, and S. Foley, “Preteaching Unknown Key Words with Incremental Rehearsal to Improve Reading Fluency and Comprehension with Children Identified as Reading Disabled,” Journal of School Psychology 42, no. 4 (2004): 303–14; M. Burns et al., “Comparison of the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Text Previewing and Preteaching Keywords as Small-Group Reading Comprehension Strategies with Middle-School Students,” Literacy Research and Instruction 50 (2011): 241–52.

33. S. Stahl and M. Fairbanks, “The Effects of Vocabulary Instruction: A Model-Based Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 56, no. 1 (1986): 72–110.

34. J. Carney et al., “Preteaching Vocabulary and the Comprehension of Social Studies Materials by Elementary School Children,” Social Education 48, no. 3 (1984): 195–96; L. Cowell, “Pre-Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Comprehension of a Narrative Text,” PhD diss. (Auburn University, 2012); R. Mayer, J. Dyck, and L. Cook, “Techniques That Help Readers Build Mental Models from Scientific Text: Definitions Pretraining and Signaling,” Journal of Educational Psychology 76, no. 6 (December 1984): 1089–1105; and Wixson, “Vocabulary Instruction.”

35. A. Fowler, “Effects of Two Prereading Activities on Comprehending Science Text: Reading Abridged Text and Learning Vocabulary Words,” PhD diss. (City University of New York, 2016).

36. R. Fukkink and K. de Glopper, “Effects of Instruction in Deriving Word Meaning from Context: A Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 68, no. 4 (January 1998): 450–69.

37. National Reading Panel, Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (US Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf.

38. M. Kuhn and S. Stahl, “Fluency: A Review of Developmental and Remedial Practices,” Journal of Educational Psychology 95, no. 1 (2003): 3–21.

39. L. Brown et al., “The Effects of Dyad Reading”; and Morgan, Wilcox, and Eldredge, “Effect of Difficulty Levels.”

40. J. Downs and K. Mohr, “A Multilevel Meta-Analysis of Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques in Elementary Classrooms,” Literacy Research and Instruction 64, no. 1 (2025): 84–111.

41. T. Duncan et al., “Not All Sentences Are Created Equal: Evaluating the Relation Between Children’s Understanding of Basic and Difficult Sentences and Their Reading Comprehension,” Journal of Educational Psychology 113, no. 2 (June 2020): 268–78.

42. D. Neville and E. Searls, “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effect of Sentence-Combining on Reading Comprehension, Reading Research and Instruction 31, no. 1 (1991): 63–76; and P. Wilkinson and D. Patty, “The Effects of Sentence Combining on the Reading Comprehension of Fourth Grade Students,” Research in the Teaching of English 27, no. 1 (1993): 104–25.

43. E. Stevens et al., “The Effects of a Paraphrasing and Text Structure Intervention on the Main Idea Generation and Reading Comprehension of Students with Reading Disabilities in Grades 4 and 5,” Scientific Studies of Reading 24, no. 5 (2020): 365–79.

44. K. Stevens, “Chunking Material as an Aid to Reading Comprehension,” Journal of Reading 25, no. 2 (November 1981): 126–29.

45. National Reading Panel, Report of the National Reading Panel, 4–42; G. Cure, E. Batu, and E. Gulboy, “Effectiveness of the Story-Mapping Strategy in Students with Disabilities: Meta-Analysis of Single-Case Experimental Design Studies,” Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties 37, no. 6 (2021): 513–34; S. Bogaerds-Hazenberg, J. Evers-Vermeul, and H. van den Bergh, “A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Text Structure Instruction on Reading Comprehension in the Upper Elementary Grades,” Reading Research Quarterly 56, no. 3 (July 2021): 435–62, 454; M. Hebert et al., “The Effects of Text Structure Instruction on Expository Reading Comprehension: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 5 (July 2016): 609–29, 622; N. Pyle et al., “Effects of Expository Text Structure Interventions on Comprehension: A Meta-Analysis,” Reading Research Quarterly 52, no. 4 (October 2017): 469–501, 497; and M. Yeari et al., “Meta-Strategic Learning of Structure Strategies in Reading Comprehension of Expository Texts,” Reading Psychology 45, no. 1 (2024): 56–77.

46. J. Kim et al., “A Longitudinal Randomized Trial of a Sustained Content Literacy Intervention from First to Second Grade: Transfer Effects on Students’ Reading Comprehension,” Journal of Educational Psychology 115, no. 1 (January 2023): 73–98.

47. J. Nordman and J. Adcock, “Addressing Low Frustration Tolerance in Students with Learning Disabilities,” Intervention in School and Clinic 59, no. 2 (2023): 133–37.

48. M. Ainley, S. Hidi, and D. Berndorff, “Interest, Learning, and the Psychological Processes That Mediate Their Relationship,” Journal of Educational Psychology 94, no. 3 (2002): 545–61; S. Feng, S. D’Mello, and A. Graesser, “Mind Wandering While Reading Easy and Difficult Texts,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 586–92; N. Forrin, E. Risko, and D. Smilek, “On the Relation Between Reading Difficulty and Mind-Wandering: A Section-Length Account,” Psychological Research 83, no. 3 (2019): 485–97; S. Fulmer and J. Frijters, “Motivation During an Excessively Challenging Reading Task: The Buffering Role of Relative Topic Interest,” Journal of Experimental Education 79, no. 2 (2011): 185–208; S. Fulmer and M. Tulis, “Changes in Interest and Affect During a Difficult Reading Task: Relationships with Perceived Difficulty and Reading Fluency,” Learning and Instruction 27 (2013): 11–20; J. Kim et al., “Engaging Struggling Adolescent Readers to Improve Reading Skills,” Reading Research Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2017): 357–82; M. McBreen and R. Savage, “The Impact of Motivational Reading Instruction on the Reading Achievement and Motivation of Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review 33, no. 3 (2020): 1125–63; C. Mills, S. D’Mello, and K. Kopp, “The Influence of Consequence Value and Text Difficulty on Affect, Attention, and Learning While Reading Instructional Texts,” Learning and Instruction 40 (2015): 9–20; C. Mills et al., “Cognitive Coupling During Reading,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2017): 872–83; E. Rosenzweig and A. Wigfield, “What If Reading Is Easy but Unimportant? How Students’ Patterns of Affirming and Undermining Motivation for Reading Information Texts Predict Different Reading Outcomes,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 48 (2017): 133–148; U. Schiefele and A. Krapp, “Topic Interest and Free Recall of Expository Text,” Learning and Individual Differences 8, no. 2 (1996): 141–60; and A. Soemer et al., “Mind Wandering and Reading Comprehension in Secondary School Children,” Learning and Individual Differences 75 (October 2019): 101778.

49. J. Carter and H. Russell, “Relationship Between Reading Frustration and Muscle Tension Levels in Children with Reading Disabilities,” American Journal of Clinical Biofeedback 2, no. 2 (1979): 60–62.

50. C. Leighton et al., “Engaging Second-Grade English Learners in Complex Texts, Topics, and Tasks,” Literacy Research and Instruction 58, no. 4 (2019): 272–94.

51. J. Eccles and A. Wigfield, “From Expectancy-Value Theory to Situated Expectancy-Value Theory: A Developmental, Social Cognitive, and Sociocultural Perspective on Motivation,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (April 2020): 101859; and L. David et al., “The Relation Between Perceived Mental Effort, Monitoring Judgments, and Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Psychology Review 36, no. 3 (2024): Article 66.

52. G. Bennett-Pierre et al., “‘This Is Hard!’ Children’s and Parents’ Talk About Difficulty During Dyadic Interactions,” Developmental Psychology 59, no. 7 (July 2023): 1268–82.

53. W. Theisen, “Provisions for Individual Differences in the Teaching of Reading,” Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 2 (1920): 560–71; and E. Sherman and A. Reed, Essentials of Teaching Reading (Chicago: University Publishing, 1909), 130.

[Illustrations by Jia Liu]