A recent RAND report, covered in EdWeek and Chalkbeat, found that almost 80% of secondary ELA teachers planned to assign students to read four or fewer books during the school year. Low-income students and students of color were less likely to be assigned full books than students in low poverty districts, with 12% of teachers in diverse, high-poverty districts assigning no books at all.

Lest this be interpreted as another story about how teachers don’t know how to teach, the teachers who didn’t assign whole books were following the curricula they were given. The RAND study found that teachers who used publisher-developed curricula assigned fewer books than teachers who were not using such curricula. 

Common sense tells us whole books matter…

Reporting on this topic suggests that we don’t really know how much reading whole books matters to students’ achievement. My friends and neighbors report being told by their kids’ teachers that reading excerpts is just as valuable as reading whole novels, because the skills students practice are the same. While it may be true that we have not empirically demonstrated the advantages of reading whole books, both literacy research and common sense suggest benefits to reading whole books. Finding the main idea - to name a popular reading skill - in a 250-word passage vs. a 250-page novel is simply not the same. Finding the main idea across a novel is a much more cognitively complex task, which involves recalling what was read across multiple sittings, determining the relative importance of various pieces of information, and synthesizing that information to form a conclusion. Finding the main idea in a passage likely involves underlining the topic sentence.   

…and so does research.

Tynesha Banks guided her students to read whole books using STARI (SERP’s Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention) a Tier 2 intervention for students who read two or more years below grade level. In one year of STARI, students read three full novels, plus a selection of thematically related shorter texts. (And to be clear, this is not enough! STARI is meant to be taught in addition to students’ Tier 1 ELA class, where we hope students are reading additional novels.) STARI has ESSA Tier 1 evidence of effectiveness - in two large randomized trials, STARI students outperformed their peers who were randomly assigned to the “business as usual” condition. So, while we can’t definitively say that reading full novels is what improves STARI students' reading achievement, we can say that STARI students read full novels, and their reading achievement improves. 

Furthermore, in addition to impacting test scores, reading whole books provides a host of other advantages. As Ms. Banks said, students feel a sense of accomplishment when they read a whole book. When students read whole books, they get swept into the world of a story. They empathize with characters, and build their ability to take on perspectives other than their own. They find joy in reading. How many of us have had a child beg for one more chapter at bedtime - and how many of us have had a child beg to read another passage? If we want students to be readers, we need to let them read whole books. 

Margaret Troyer serves as Director of Literacy Research & Development at SERP Institute.