Won’t Challenging Texts Discourage Young Readers?

Teacher Question: I know you say students learn more when taught with grade level texts than texts at their reading levels. That may be true but won’t frustrating kids like that make them hate reading?

Shanahan responds:

I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading.

Though reading experts have long labeled some texts as “frustration level,” I hope you won’t take that moniker too literally.

To be fair, your concern does seem justified according to some studies. For instance, middle school students say that when texts are difficult, their interest declines (Wade, 2001). Correlations among reading comprehension and affective variables like motivation tend to be significant and positive. Some studies report more off task behavior with frustration level texts, though usually with no detriment to learning (Durik & Matarazzo, 2009).

When reading such studies, it’s hard to remember that the instructional level idea is about guided or directed reading, not independent work. Someone trying to read a challenging text on their own might give up – what other choice do they have? But the situation is quite different when reading a text under a teacher’s tutelage.

It’s also important to know that while some studies have suggested a link between text level and motivation, there is also contrary evidence. A study conducted by Linda Gambrell and her colleagues, for example, found through observations that students placed in frustration level texts were more likely to be off task and to present behavior problems in classrooms (Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981). That part of the study is often cited by leveled reading proponents.

However, these researchers did something very interesting, something that is usually ignored. They shifted these students into instructional level texts to generate the desired behavioral improvements. To their surprise, the new text placements had no impact on behavior. Lower-performing students were most likely to be placed in challenging texts and to exhibit discipline problems, but those correlates were evidently NOT causally related.

Another study concluded that teachers often failed to distinguish behavioral problems from low reading ability (Learned, 2016). In other words, low readers were presumed to pose disciplinary challenges for teachers whether there was misbehavior or not. This researcher concluded that the students’ overly easy text and task placements were causing students’ low enthusiasm and misbehavior rather than reducing it. Boy, talk about seeing a problem in a different light (oh, by the way, the students agreed with the researcher that the texts were boringly easy).

I think what teachers may miss is that engagement is more than a text level phenomenon. Researchers have come to see affective variables as being more situational or event-driven than generalized or person-centered (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Text difficulty may have an effect, but so does text content, the novelty of a lesson, and several other instructional variables, all of which interact – dominating in some cases and compensating in others. Students may be discouraged by text difficulty in one instance (e.g., generating feelings of incompetence), and encouraged by it in another (e.g., feelings of challenge and worthwhile accomplishment).

Let’s face it. Motivation is complicated. Students in a reading lesson may be driven by a desire to please their parents, to identify with a teacher, to connect with peers, to seek competence, or to pursue interesting information from a text. These desires not only may reinforce or cancel each other out, but they may stimulate complex responses. Difficulty can lead both to withdrawal and intensification of effort. Motivation can vary minute to minute – students who are motivated early in a text may be less engaged by the end.

One problem with instructional level theory is that it treats motivation simplistically. It assumes that difficulty alone matters and that if instruction is arranged so that students will find texts easy, then they’ll want to read and want to learn to read.

Students may hope to avoid difficulty, but they also prefer to work with text better aligned with their maturity levels (Lupo, Tortorelli, Invernizzi, Ryoo, & Strong, 2019). Assigning a fourth grader to a second-grade book is more likely to discourage students’ reading than to support it. The embarrassment inherent in low group assignment has disheartened more than a few children. A steady diet of such instruction may do more to suppress personal reading than would working with grade level texts. Sadly, in far too many classrooms, students are not even allowed to try to read books on their own if they are not at “just the right” level (Glasswell & Ford, 2011; Hoffman, 2017), enforcing a sense that, “you are low reader and there is nothing you can do to overcome the limits that imposes.”

Another serious motivational problem inherent in the instructional level is that the reading improvement that it fosters is so gradual as to be imperceptible to most readers. Because the distance between text levels and student levels are so small, any learning gains are necessarily tiny. This may be why so many students express dissatisfaction with their reading instruction. Unlike in other school subjects, it is difficult to perceive improvement.

Instead of avoiding challenge, I think it better to introduce it intentionally, placing students in books that they cannot already read well.

Rather than reducing the demands of the curriculum, teachers should offer pedagogical and emotional supports toward mitigating the difficulty and encouraging persistence in its face.

Let students know what you are up to and scaffold their success as well as their awareness of improvement.

Be positive and encouraging and focus reading lessons on texts worth reading.

Finally, don’t overdo it. Not every text need be especially demanding to build proficiency while maintaining a high level of motivation.

References

Durik, A. M., & Matarazzo, K. L. (2009). Revved up or turned off? How domain knowledge changes the relationship between perceived task complexity and task interest. Learning and Individual Differences, 19(1), 155-159.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2008.08.005 

Gambrell, L. B., Wilson, R. M., & Gantt, W. N. (1981). Classroom observations of task-attending behaviors of good and poor readers. Journal of Educational Research, 74(6), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1981.10885339

Glasswell, K., & Ford, M. (2011). Let’s start leveling about leveling. Language Arts, 88(3), 208-216.

Hidi, S., & Renninger, K. A. (2006). The four-phase model of interest development. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 111-127. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_4

Hoffman, J. V. (2017). What if “just right” is just wrong? The unintended consequences of leveling readers. The Reading Teacher 71(3), 265-273.  https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1611

Learned, J. E. (2016). ‘The behavior kids’: Examining the conflation of youth reading difficulty and behavior problem positioning among school institutional contexts. American Educational Research Journal, 53(5), 1271-1309.

Lupo, S. M., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J. H., & Strong, J. Z. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly 54(4), 457-479. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.247

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Wade. S. E. (2001). Research on importance and interest: Implications for curriculum development and future research. Educational Psychology Review 13(3), 243–261.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast