The Instructional Level Concept Revisited: Teaching with Complex Text
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23 March, 2024
26 Comments
Blast from the Past: This piece first posted on February 7, 2017, and was reposted on March 23, 2024. Nothing to change or update here, but given recent questions and discussions on social media, I think it would be worthwhile to revisit the topic. I’ve been beavering away at a book manuscript that will go into much greater detail on this topic, that I hope will be available to everyone in 2025. It won’t reach different conclusions either, even given new scholarship on the issue.
Boy, oh, boy! The past couple weeks have brought unseasonably warm temperatures to the Midwest, and an unusual flurry of questions concerning teaching children at their, so-called, “instructional levels.” Must be salesman season, or something.
One question was asked specifically about my colleague, Dick Allington, since he has published articles and chapters saying that teaching kids with challenging text is a dumb idea. A couple of others referred to advertising copy for Units of Study, a program published by Teachers College Press. Both Dick and TCP had thrown the R-word (research) around quite a bit, but neither managed to conjure up any studies that supported their claims. That means that the instructional level, after 71 years, still remains unsubstantiated.
What I’m referring to is the long-held belief that kids learn more when they are matched to texts in particular ways. The claim is that learning is squelched if a text is too hard or too easy. I bought into it as a teacher and spent a lot of time testing kids to find out which books they could learn from and trying to prevent their contact with the verboten ones.
According to proponents of the instructional level, if a text is too easy, there is nothing to learn. Let’s face it, if a reader already knows all the words in a text and can answer a bunch of questions with no teacher support, that wouldn’t be much of a learning opportunity. I buy that. Surprisingly, however, early investigations found the opposite — the less there was to learn from a book, the greater progress the students seemed to make. Yikes! This was so obviously wrong, that the researchers rejected their own findings and made up some criteria for separating the independent and instructional levels.
Likewise, the theory posits that texts can be too hard – preventing children from learning and crushing their tender motivation.
But what’s too easy and what’s too hard?
Back in the 1940s, Emmett Betts, reading authority extraordinaire, reported on a research study completed by one of his students. He implied that the study showed that if you matched kids to text using the criteria he proposed (95-98% word reading accuracy and 75-89% reading comprehension), kids learned more.
Unfortunately, there was no such study of learning. Betts just made up the numbers and teachers and professors have rapturously clung to them ever since. Generation after generation of teachers has been told that teaching kids at their instructional levels improves learning.
Over the past decade or so, some scholars have begun to realize that this widely recommended practice is the educational equivalent of fake news and have started reporting studies into its ineffectiveness.
The instructional level has not done well. It either has made no difference — that is the kids taught from grade level materials do as well as those placed at an instructional level — or the instructional level placements have led to less learning. This is probably because easier texts tend to limit kids’ exposure to linguistic and textual features that they don’t yet know how to negotiate. Kids not so protected, often do better.
It still makes sense to start kids out with relatively easy texts when they are in K-1, since they must learn to decode. Beginning reading texts should have enough repetition and clear exposure to the most frequent and straightforward spelling patterns in our language. But, once that hurdle is overcome, it makes no sense to teach everybody as if they were 5-year-olds. From Grade 2 on, it appears that kids can learn plenty when taught with more challenging texts.
Here are some related questions asked of me over the past 2-3 weeks:
My kids are learning to read, and they have for years. Why change now?
Because of the opportunity cost; your students could do even better. Students often tell me that they hate reading specifically because they always get placed in what they call the “stupid kid books.” If kids can learn as much or more from the grade level texts — and they can — we should be giving them opportunities to read the texts that are more at their intellectual levels and that match their age-level interests.
Isn’t it true that the studies in which the kids did better varied not just the book levels, but how the students were taught?
Yes, that is true, and instructional level proponents have raised that as a reason to reject that evidence. However, no one is claiming that students learn more simply by being placed in harder books. As students confront greater amounts of challenge the teaching demands go up. One suspects that part of the popularity of the instructional level is that teachers don’t have to do as much (since kids already know most of the words and can comprehend the texts on their own).
What about older kids who are still “beginning readers?”
Anyone—at whatever age level—who is just starting to learn to read, is still going to need to master decoding. Teaching older students with a steady diet of more demanding texts may make it harder to master the relations between spelling and pronunciation. Stay with relatively easy books at least part of the time with older readers who are reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level.
Are you saying no more small group teaching?
No, small group teaching can be productive, unless the purpose of that grouping is to teach students with different levels of books. I think it would make more sense to work with small groups when teaching with harder texts, since this would facilitate greater teacher support. We do the opposite now. We place kids in relatively easy text and then place them in small groups to get the extra attention that isn’t needed under those circumstances.
You don’t believe in differentiation?
I believe in differentiation, but not if that mainly means teaching kids with different levels of books. There is a large and growing body of research that suggests that we would be better off varying the scaffolding provided to different students who are working with the same books.
Dick Allington admits that kids can learn more from more challenging texts but says that the scaffolding to do this would be too demanding for an average teacher. What do you think?
Dick was referring to studies done by Alyssa Morgan and Melanie Kuhn. In both, the frustration level placements led to more learning. In the Morgan study, the treatment was paired reading. That means the powerful instructional scaffolding that was provided was delivered by untrained 7-year-olds. My hunch is that the average teacher can scaffold as well as a second grader (I think there is a TV show about something like that). This is not for elite teachers only.
You totally reject the instructional level idea for anyone but beginners?
No, I’ve come to believe that the instructional level would be a great goal to aim at for at the completion of a lesson. If, when you are finishing up with a text, the kids know 75% or more of the ideas and can read 95% or more of the words, you have done a terrific job. One of Linnea Ehri’s studies found that the kids who did best ended up with 98% accuracy. Of course, if you start with texts at those levels, that leaves little to teach. Start with texts students cannot yet read successfully; then teach them to read those texts so well that people would think those texts were at their instructional levels. Make it the outcome, not the input.
Should all the texts that we teach from be at the levels that Common Core set?
No, I’d argue (based on little direct evidence) that students should read several texts across their school days and school years. This reading should vary greatly in difficulty, from relatively easy texts that would afford students extensive reads with little teacher support, to very demanding texts that could only be accomplished successfully with a great deal of rereading and teacher scaffolding.
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What do you think kids should read to develop fluency and stamina?
Thank you for this post. How do you define independent, instructional and frustrational levels? Our district uses F&P’s BAS to determine these. Sharing your knowledge on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
I am surprised (and a bit disappointed) that the essay above focuses almost entirely on the reading LEVEL of the materials students would be reading. There is scant mention of the CONTENT of the reading material. I'm a retired elementary teacher and school principal, and it has been my experience that students are often thrilled to read materials whose content they find interesting or unique. Our school was located in a public housing project in Boston, but it was also the site of an often-neglected holiday called Evacuation Day -- based on the date the the occupying British soldiers left Boston, back in the day. The British were evicted by the arrival of cannons that Henry Knox (the guy Fort Knox was later named after) had brought all the way across the Hudson River and then all of Massachusetts, and snuck up the hill that happened to be behind our school, overlooking Boston. By coincidence, the date of this event was March 17 ... and its significance was later eclipsed by the arrival of huge numbers of Irish immigrants, who celebrated St. Patrick's Day on the same date! As our students became experts about this holiday, based on the READING they had done of books I found on Amazon . . . that seemed to me to be an important series of reading (and writing) lessons. The students were sufficiently proud of their developing knowledge of an event that even public officials barely understood - - - that the value of READING was obvious to the students. And the rewards of interest and endless praise from adults certainly helped! The skills of reading are very important; the content of the reading material is truly important as well!
I think what you are saying is that the zone of proximal development can mean several different things (decoding, content, interest, supported reading) when it comes to choosing texts. I also find that "leveled" texts are vastly different than decodable texts, and since I teach young students with dyslexia or other developmental delays, I have to use decodable texts in my lessons.
What Are your thoughts?
Leave me a comment and I would like to have a discussion with you!
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