How Reading Lists Can Improve Assessments

Shared reading experiences can produce fairer gauges of mastery

Texas recently announced new required-reading lists: specific texts for each grade. To say the readings have received a lot of attention is an understatement. This is largely because they include Bible passages. Like many, I have concerns about the Eurocentric nature of the required readings, but I’m not writing to debate the Texas list. I want to talk about the merits of creating specific or general reading lists as a way to improve large-scale reading tests.

As I wrote recently, simply knowing how to decode words and read fluently is no guarantee that students will comprehend what they’ve read, especially when the task requires deeper levels of inference. Possessing a robust vocabulary and, especially, knowledge of the world (contextual knowledge) are critical components of reading comprehension. The science of reading doesn’t, by itself, help build knowledge of the world. For that, students need the kind of exposure and experiences often afforded to well-off children, or skilled teachers who embed this knowledge systematically in their instruction.

The “science of reading” movement, when comprehensively implemented, has undoubtedly helped students learn to read words. Unfortunately, fluent word reading does not automatically translate into reading comprehension, particularly at deeper levels of understanding.

How Shared Reading Experiences Reduce Transfer Demands

Recognizing that we can’t solve these larger social and economic challenges so easily requires that we create shared reading experiences grounded in meaningful ideas, preferably tied to rich curricular content, such as science, social studies, and the humanities. Building these world experiences can help reduce the transfer burden that many students experience on large-scale reading tests.

Some of you might argue, “But don’t we want students to be able to transfer (generalize) what they have learned in one setting to other, more novel contexts?” Yes, we do, but transfer doesn’t just happen on its own. Both cognitive and sociocultural theoretical frameworks explain how deeper learning promotes transfer. Both also describe how transfer exists on a continuum, from highly familiar to novel, or from proximal to distal types, in the language of learning science.

Students need diverse experiences with multiple representations of knowledge and skills to build the kind of deeper learning that facilitates distal transfer. Reading lists, chosen well, can help deliver this.

Learning theory can help us be clear about how big a transfer leap is fair to expect of students. What opportunities have we provided for our students to facilitate different degrees of transfer? Simply placing “curriculum-neutral” passages in front of students is blind to the fact that we are asking students to engage in varying degrees of transfer, and we are rarely clear about the level of transfer we’re asking.

Unfortunately, there are systemically unequal opportunities to acquire the background knowledge that supposedly “curriculum-neutral” passages require. Therefore, we end up asking the most disadvantaged students to demonstrate the most distal kinds of transfers.

Creating More Equitable Reading Assessments

How does all this relate to the Texas reading lists? If the passages on the Texas state assessment are drawn from the required texts, students will find them familiar, so their transfer leap will be shorter. This could help level the transfer playing field if students are provided meaningful opportunities to engage with these texts. Even if the passages are not drawn directly from the required texts, using passages with similar contexts and writing styles can be helpful and provide insight into how well students can engage in near transfer.

These types of “warm reads” were used in Louisiana’s Innovative Assessment Program (IAP). The IAP included reading passages from texts that students read as part of their regular instruction, or “hot reads.” The warm reads were intended to see how well students could apply (transfer) what they learned in their curriculum to similar topics. Research into the IAP suggested that “[t]he new test design may be ‘leveling the playing field’ by providing students a more equitable opportunity to show what they know.”

For example, if students were required to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a warm read could be drawn from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or Timothy Egan’s non-fiction The Worst Hard Times. The important thing is that, by reading The Grapes of Wrath, students have been exposed to the subject matter and writing style that will feel familiar when they encounter passages from The Jungle or The Worst Hard Times. Curriculum and assessment designers need to thoughtfully select the clusters of texts that will produce that experience of familiarity.

Connecting Reading Lists, Curriculum, and Assessment

Another challenge of using a reading list is that it can appear to be an attempt to control the curriculum without actually doing so. This is a political, not a pedagogical, challenge, but those who go this route should be prepared for it. Part of Louisiana’s IAP’s success was that all participating districts used the same curriculum. This means that the texts were built into curriculum units, so instead of relying on stand-alone texts, students could build their understanding of the texts’ content and style through rich curricular interactions.

However, as I mentioned in my last post, we could reduce the transfer challenge while also giving students the opportunity to learn science, social studies, humanities, and other topics if the state announced that the reading passages on the state test would be drawn from specific topic areas. Schools would then realize they needed to provide rich content and experiences so their students would have the background knowledge necessary to successfully engage with the test.

Again, while I have concerns about the specifics of the Texas reading, I appreciate the broader idea of ensuring that students are tested on texts that are at least somewhat familiar. A particular list of required readings is not necessary to reduce the transfer burden, as I discussed above. The important thing is that we have to stop treating large-scale reading assessment items as transfer exercises that demand more of students than we’ve given them the tools to master.