According to some teachers and college professors, children aren’t reading as many whole books anymore.
But just how widespread is this purported trend, and what does it mean for students’ literacy skills?
Education Week dove deep into these questions in a recent story that explored the history of using excerpts in English classes, the research base on whole-class, whole-book reading, and the perspectives of teachers who make daily choices about what students should read—juggling factors liketime constraints, instructional goals, and students’ own shifting relationship to books.
“I really, truly believe in a healthy diet of varied reading experiences,” said Michelle Wolfe, a high school English teacher in Baker, W.Va., whose instructional plan includes novels, poetry, plays, and short stories throughout the year.
“We’re dealing with shorter attention spans,” Wolfe said, after referencing the TikTok and YouTube videos her students favor. “You can want to recognize it, and react to it, and also help students prolong their attention spans.”
Here are three main insights from the story, and be sure to read the full article here.
1. There’s no good data on how much reading students do in school
It’s well-documented that all Americans—not just kids—are reading less in their leisure time than in decades past. The share of 9- and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun daily or weekly has been in steady decline since the 1980s. In 2021, U.S. adults on average said they read 12.6 books a year, compared with 15.3 books in 1990.
But whether that trend has extended into schools isn’t as clear. Surveys paint conflicting pictures.
For example, 2023 data from the EdWeek Research Center found that a quarter of educators in grades 3-8 said students primarily read excerpts in their classes. But another recent survey, from the National Council of Teachers of English this year, found that the most popular texts used in middle and high schools are all novels and plays.
There is no national dataset tracking how much reading students do as part of their coursework, nor about how many (and what type) of texts teachers assign.
2. Many popular curricula don’t put novels in core reading lessons. But that’s not a new trend
Several commonly used English/language arts programs for elementary schoolers feature student readers—compilations of full-length short texts, like picture books, and excerpts from longer texts. Core reading lessons center on the text in these readers.
These programs often give users the option to swap out units for novel study, or structure small group work around whole books, but it’s not required.
District spending on at least two of these programs—Into Reading, published by HMH, and Wonders, published by McGraw Hill—has doubled since 2020.
Other programs do feature at least some whole books, such as Great Minds’ Wit & Wisdom or novel-centric offerings like Bookworms. One of the most influential gauges of curriculum quality, EdReports, does not base its ratings on the mix of texts that the curriculum series select.
While the anthology-based curricula may be surging in popularity now, the idea of primarily using excerpts and short texts in reading instruction is actually hundreds of years old.
These compilation books, often called basal readers, were in widespread use starting in the mid-19th century, and remained a staple of U.S. classrooms through the end of the 20th century. (See more on the history of the basal reader.)
3. Studies suggest whole books matter. But they don’t prescribe a recipe
Do students who read mostly novels in class become better readers than students who read mostly excerpts? Research doesn’t offer much in the way of answers.
There are a few studies that point to benefits from novel-reading, most notably one conducted in 2015 from researchers at the University of Sussex in England. They found that when middle-grade teachers read two novels back to back with their students over the course of a few months—more full-text reading than students would have normally done during that period—children made above-average progress in general reading comprehension.
Still, there’s no one research-tested syllabus. How many full length books should children be reading each year? How should that vary by grade level? Those are open questions.
