Building Up to Frustration-Level Text

02 September, 2014

Building Up to Frustration-Level Text

Timothy Shanahan

In the latest print edition of Reading Today, Timothy Shanahan presented a summary of his research address from the IRA 2014 Conference in New Orleans concerning the question of whether or not to teach students at their reading levels.

Shanahan, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who serves on IRA’s Literacy Research Panel, cited what he referred to as misused research evidence, concluding that sticking only with student-text matching can result in a scenario in which the learner never really catches up. Instead, he suggested more emphasis on scaffolding to help students better grasp frustration text and not veer away from it.

He concluded by stating he has found more than 20 studies that used scaffolding to allow students to read frustration-level text as if it was at their instructional level. Here are those studies:

Read Full Article