Debunking the Leveled Reading Myth

I’ve learned a lot from reading researcher Timothy Shanahan over the years—and now I can say I’ve learned even more.

One of the most important things I (and, I’m sure, others) have learned from him is that there’s no real evidence supporting the pervasive practice of leveled reading. That approach limits students to reading at their presumed “individual” reading level, which could be years below their grade level. In the past, Shanahan has addressed that issue in articles and blog posts.

Now he has taken on the topic in a fully fleshed-out book entitled Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. (The phrase used in the title, as Shanahan acknowledges, was coined by his former student, Alfred Tatum.) The book traces the genesis of the assumption that kids should be matched to texts they can read fairly easily. That assumption has led to a system that, albeit unintentionally, often keeps struggling readers at a permanent disadvantage.

Shanahan describes how, in the early 20^th century, a “theory of readiness” emerged from academia, holding that children could learn only if they were adequately prepared to do so—and that it could be harmful to teach them things they weren’t developmentally “ready” for. New psychological theories reinforced that view by focusing on the dangers of frustration. Measures were being developed for assessing both the capabilities of different readers and the difficulty levels of various texts.

Against that background enters Emmett Betts, the author of what Shanahan calls the “most influential reading textbook of its era,” Foundations of Reading Instruction, published in 1946.1 The book set out three individual levels of reading that all students were presumed to possess: independent, instructional, and frustration. In a Goldilocks-like framework, independent was thought to be too easy, frustration too hard, and instructional level just right.

A “Scientific” Formula

Betts put forward a formula that sounded precise and scientific: If a student could read the words of a text with 95 to 98 percent accuracy and could comprehend 75 to 89 percent of it, that text was at the student’s instructional level. The instructional level framework became the basis of virtually all reading instruction in the US and some other countries.2

How did Betts come up with this theory? Shanahan points to a dissertation by one of Betts’ graduate students, Patsy Aloysius Kilgallon. Shanahan had assumed that Betts or Kilgallon ran an experiment: have some students read