Districts Gear Up for Shift to Informational Texts

In an English/language arts classroom in Iowa, 10th graders are analyzing the rhetoric in books about computer geeks, fast food, teenage marketing, the working poor, chocolate-making, and diamond-mining.

Their teacher, Sarah Brown Wessling, let them choose books about those real-world topics as part of a unit on truth. Students are dissecting the sources, statistics, and anecdotes the authors use to make their arguments in books like Branded by Alissa Quart and Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. An earlier unit in the class at Johnston High School, in a Des Moines suburb, focused on film documentaries.

The units mark a heftier emphasis on nonfiction for Ms. Wessling. What she is doing reflects an intensifying focus for teachers across the country: how to develop students' skills at reading and understanding informational texts.

Teachers are rebalancing their fiction-and-nonfiction scales because the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts demand it. Since all but four states have adopted those guidelines, millions of teachers are now faced with the challenge of revising materials and instruction accordingly.

"Often, our nod to nonfiction is the autobiography or true-story version of something," said Ms. Wessling, who was the 2010 National Teacher of the Year. "But there's a real gap in other kinds of nonfiction. Students absolutely understand how to read a piece of fiction with a beginning, middle, and end. But that's not how you read things like Nickel and Dimed. It's a much slower process.

"I'm relying on different kinds of strategies and a lot more explicit teaching," she said. "We spend a lot of time talking about attributes of nonfiction, like how to read an interview. Or how to tell the difference between fact and opinion."

As states and districts press more deeply into informational text, however, some experts are cautioning them to maintain a proper balance with fiction.

"While we think the emphasis on informational text is a useful idea, our concern is that it could move from being an emphasis to a sole approach," Richard M. Long, the director of governmental relations for the International Reading Association, said in an email. "Using fiction has many positive and useful values, and it shouldn't be lost or pushed so far to the sidelines that it disappears."

Sarah Brown Wessling uses these nonfiction books, among others, in her 10th grade English/language arts classroom in Johnston, Iowa, to reflect the Common Core State Standards' emphasis on informational text.

—iStockphoto/hiro-pm

Every state and district official interviewed for this story hastened to note, without being asked, that fiction would maintain a central position in the curriculum.

Addressing a Need

The common standards' emphasis on informational text arose in part from research suggesting that employers and college instructors found students weak at comprehending technical manuals, scientific and historical journals, and other texts pivotal to their work in those arenas.

Influencing the standards, also, were the frameworks for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading, which reflect an increasing emphasis on informational texts as students get older. They draw equally from informational and literary passages at the 4th grade level. But by 8th grade, the tilt toward informational reading reaches 55 percent, and by 12th grade, it's 70 percent.

The common core's vision of informational text includes literary nonfiction, as well as historical documents, scientific journals and technical manuals, biographies and autobiographies, essays, speeches, and information displayed in charts, graphs, or maps, digitally or in print. Helping students tackle complex examples of such genres across the disciplines—from English to engineering—bolsters them for work and ...

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