Reading Whole Books, and "Miracles" in Education
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Science of reading
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The article discusses Mississippi's success in teaching reading through methods aligned with scientific evidence. The science of reading movement represents the cognitive science research base that informed these reforms.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
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Referenced as an example of a novel that students struggled to understand when only reading excerpts. Understanding the novel's cultural significance and complexity illuminates why whole-book reading matters.
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National Assessment of Educational Progress
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The NAEP reading tests are central to the Mississippi debate discussed in the article. Understanding how these assessments work and what they measure provides crucial context for evaluating educational claims.
Have you heard that kids are reading fewer whole books in school, and that instead they’re getting just brief texts or excerpts of longer works? Some say that’s a big problem, others say there’s no evidence to show it makes a difference—and still others have said there’s no real evidence it’s happening.
As of this morning, we have new evidence that it is happening, courtesy of New York Times education reporter Dana Goldstein. It’s not a scientific study, but the Times issued a call for input on the issue and got over 2,000 responses. Given that there don’t appear to be any truly scientific studies out there on the subject, that’s probably the best we’re going to get. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that whole books and novels are fading from the curriculum, even in high school.
As it happens, I’ve written an article on the importance of having kids read whole books that just appeared in the Winter issue of American Educator. I wrote it months ago, so I wasn’t able to cite Goldstein’s article. But my piece covers many of the same factors pushing teachers to use brief texts that Goldstein’s does: lack of instructional time, kids’ shortened attention spans (thanks, screens and social media), the need to expose students to different genres of text, and—according to Goldstein’s data, primarily—curricula that focus on excerpts.
One fundamental factor that Goldstein doesn’t mention is the widespread belief that it’s more important to teach kids supposedly transferable skills like “making inferences” than to ensure that they read and understand any particular text. That’s one reason curricula focus on excerpts, and it’s also a belief that teachers are inculcated with during their training.
“The Skills Are the Same”
In my piece, I quote one middle school teacher’s explanation for why his class was only reading excerpts or just the first half of a chapter book: “it doesn’t matter whether it’s the entire book or an excerpt,” he said, because “the skills are the same.” (This anecdote is courtesy of education journalist Holly Korbey, to whom I am also indebted for the amusing yet depressing anecdote with which I begin my piece—an excerpt from a post by a former teacher whose class was hopelessly confused about the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird.)
It might seem like common sense to have kids read a whole novel rather than, say, just the
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.