Should students approach literature like an informational text?

The Common Core State Standards were designed to help students prepare for college and careers, so it's no surprise that they emphasize evidence in reading. Students have to search for quotes or passages to support claims they make about the meaning of the text. Learning to do this now sets students up for college, where they'll have to do the same thing when writing reports or studying a book. But text comes in a variety of forms and genres – should readers approach them all, in their great diversity, the same way?

What the Standards say
The Standards for reading both literature and informational texts are very similar. In fact, the Common Core outlines the following skills students should develop while reading literature and informational texts:

  • Cite evidence to support analysis of the text.
  • Determine the work's central theme and analyze ways the writer supports it throughout the text.
  • Decipher the meaning of words and phrases in the text, including literal and metaphorical meaning.

Each facet of reading has its own Standards as well – for instance, literature includes benchmarks about plot, character and allegory. Informational texts include goals for determining the author's point of view and how he or she develops an argument.

Rethinking evidence
Knowing to look for evidence to support a claim and how to do it is an important skill. Students should know how to make suggestions anchored in proof. However, some fear the hunt for evidence may detract from the joy or point of reading literature. In this case, we refer to literature as fictional texts that have a narrative structure, including books like "Jane Eyre," "Lord of the Flies" and "A Tale of Two Cities." 

Asking questions of those texts is quite important – you likely won't understand the argument made in "Lord of the Flies" if you don't dig deep and analyze the information William Golding presents. However, some educators fear that by conditioning students to read for evidence, kids will spend their time searching for quotes and less time reading the book and grasping its meaning as a whole. 

In an article she wrote for Education Week, Mia Hood, a graduate instructor and doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, and an assistant professor of practice at the Relay Graduate School of Education, likened the Common Core reading structure to a squirrel saving nuts for winter. Students pick up passages and quotes to answer the questions they either know or assume their teacher will ask. This prevents them from stepping back, enjoying the book and understanding it as a single work. They look for the trees instead of the forest. Of course, students should look at the trees too, perhaps just after they finish the novel.

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