Reading Informational Texts: Book I Reading Informational Teacher’s ...

ReadingTexts: Book I

Reading Informational

Informational

Teacher¡¯s Edition

Texts:

SAMPLE

Nonfiction Passages

and Exercises

I

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INTRODUCTION

to the Teacher¡¯s Edition

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Introduction to the Teacher¡¯s Edition

¡°READING INFORMATIONAL TEXTS¡±

IN THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS

This series is based on the Reading Informational Texts objectives of the Common

Core State Standards (CCSS).

In the English Language Arts category, ¡°Reading:

Informational Texts¡± is one of the five main

Reading: Literature

subdivisions of the CCSS.

Reading: Informational Texts

As the research published in the CCSS¡¯s appendices

Writing

explains, there has been a downward trend in the

complexity of the texts students have been required

Speaking and Listening

to read in school over the past decades, and there

Language

are now, according to the Common Core Initiative,

¡°too many students reading at too low a level.¡±

Meanwhile, texts required for success in business and in college have, in large part,

increased in difficulty over the same time period. Hence, while students who excel

at reading informational texts will have an advantage over their peers in applying to

college and performing college coursework, even those students who find employment

immediately after high school will likely benefit from this skill. Texts read in many

professions have been found to significantly exceed a twelfth-grade reading level.1

The CCSS describes research that indicates a growing disparity between what is being

taught in schools and what is being read in the workplace:2

Research indicates that the demands that college, careers, and citizenship place on

readers have either held steady or increased over roughly the last fifty years. The

difficulty of college textbooks, as measured by Lexile scores,3 has not decreased in any

block of time since 1962; it has, in fact, increased over that period (Stenner, Koons, &

Swartz, in press).

The word difficulty of every scientific journal and magazine from 1930 to 1990 examined

by Hayes and Ward (1992) had actually increased, which is important in part because,

as a 2005 College Board study (Milewski, Johnson, Glazer, & Kubota, 2005) found,

college professors assign more readings from periodicals than do high school teachers.

Workplace reading, measured in Lexiles, exceeds grade 12 complexity significantly,

although there is considerable variation (Stenner, Koons, & Swartz, in press). The

vocabulary difficulty of newspapers remained stable over the 1963¨C1991 period Hayes

and his colleagues (Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996) studied.

Furthermore, students in college are expected to read complex texts with substantially

¡°Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical

Subjects, Appendix A: Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards,¡± 2.

¡°Common Core State Standards, Appendix A,¡± 2¨C3.

3

The Lexile? Framework for Reading is a text-complexity measure that is frequently referred to in the CCSS to express

levels of reading difficulty.

1

2

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vii

BOOK I Reading Informational Texts: Nonfiction Passages and Exercises Based on the Common Core State Standards

greater independence (i.e., much less scaffolding) than are students in typical K¨C12

programs. College students are held more accountable for what they read on their own

than are most students in high school (Erickson & Strommer, 1991; Pritchard, Wilson, &

Yamnitz, 2007). College instructors assign readings, not necessarily explicated in class,

for which students might be held accountable through exams, papers, presentations, or

class discussions. Students in high school, by contrast, are rarely held accountable for

what they are able to read independently (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007). This discrepancy

in task demand, coupled with what we see below is a vast gap in text complexity, may

help explain why only about half of the students taking the ACT Test in the 2004¨C2005

academic year could meet the benchmark score in reading (which also was the case in

2008¨C2009, the most recent year for which data are available) and why so few students

in general are prepared for postsecondary reading (ACT, Inc., 2006, 2009).

Because of the increasing challenges students will face beyond high school, preparing

them to successfully read and understand informational texts is important not just for

the sake of fulfilling standards; it is truly a means of increasing a student¡¯s odds of

success in life.

To prepare American high school students to meet the demands of an increasingly

challenging job market, the Common Core State Standards challenge all students¡ª

even remedial readers¡ªto read increasingly complex texts. The standards suggest that

at every grade level, students should be reading more difficult texts than have typically

been taught in recent decades. The solution to the problem of deficient reading skills,

according to the CCSS, is to assign more difficult texts¡ªnot less difficult ones.

The goal of Prestwick House¡¯s Reading Informational Texts series is to introduce high

school students to challenging nonfiction texts, many of which would not ordinarily

be seen in a traditional English classroom, in a way that fulfills the objectives of the

Common Core¡¯s ¡°Reading Informational Texts¡± standards.

SERIES OBJECTIVES

The standards in the Reading Informational Texts category are not easy to fulfill.

They require students to interact with complex works, many of which have not

traditionally been taught in language-arts classrooms¡ªfrom foundational government

documents to Supreme Court opinions. We¡¯ve created this series to simplify the

process of teaching and studying these complex informational texts, making it possible

to satisfy the standards in this category for a given high school grade through a single

book and accompanying Power Presentation.

Each book in this series was designed to fulfill the Reading Informational Texts

standards for a specific grade level. By working through this book and the corresponding

viii

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Introduction to the Teacher¡¯s Edition

Reading Informational Texts Power Presentation, students should gain reading skills in

each of the categories described in the CCSS¡¯s Informational Texts standards.

This series lays the groundwork for teaching the Reading Informational Texts

standards. It includes the following:

? texts selected using the criteria established in the standards

? grade-appropriate exercises and assignments based on the Reading

Informational Texts standards

? grade-appropriate scaffolding based on the level suggested by the CCSS.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS SERIES

Each book in the Reading Informational Texts series contains the following components:

1. Introduction

2. Reading Selections (each including an introduction to the text,

the annotated text itself, vocabulary words and definitions,

and a set of short-answer and essay questions)

3. Bibliography

1. Introduction

The teacher¡¯s editions of each book in this series contain extra introductory materials that

are not found in the students¡¯ texts. Each teacher¡¯s edition contains a general overview

of Prestwick House¡¯s Reading Informational Texts series, as well as an introduction to

the specific volume in the series. Among other features, the introductory materials

include information about the standards, the process of choosing reading selections,

and explanations of the book¡¯s various components.

2. Reading Selections

Each book contains a variety of reading selections that represent the text types

appropriate for the Reading Informational Texts standards, arranged in order of

increasing difficulty. These texts were chosen based on criteria established in the CCSS,

in consultation with a panel of experienced English Language Arts teachers from across

the United States¡ªPrestwick House¡¯s National Curriculum Advisory Board.

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