EXPOSURE TO REALISTIC AND PRACTICAL INFORMATIONAL TEXTS
While magazines in general have long been used as supplementary reading material in classrooms, their value extends far beyond recreational reading. Scholastic Magazines+ provides information that is factual, current and specialized to support specific lessons or overall instructional themes. For example, the grade-leveled Scholastic News ® magazine focuses on current events that captivate students’ attention and support classroom curriculum; Scholastic MATH ® provides students in grades 6–9 with real-world connections to math that make the subject more accessible and relatable; and SuperScience ® provides students in grades 3–6 with current science news to support STEM learning. 2 Scholastic Magazines+ supports the higher standards for kindergarten through grade 5 that require elementary students to read an equal balance of high-quality, complex literature and informational texts in the classroom. Specifically, teachers are encouraged to include an array of text types within the informational text category, including biographies and autobiographies; books about history, social studies, science and the arts; and technical texts, including directions, forms, and information displayed in graphs, charts, or maps on a range of topics. Yet students in these grades typically have greater exposure to fiction texts than other written texts in school; this is especially the case in lower socioeconomic communities (Duke, 2000). Further, exposure to informational texts is crucial for students to meet national assessment standards. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Framework in 2009 called for 50% of the assessment’s reading passages to be informational text by fourth grade (National Assessment Governing Board, 2008). This inclusion of more informational passages in the NAEP Reading Assessment is representative of the trend toward rigorous reading assessments across literary genres. Researchers agree that exposure to informational text is critical to students’ overall literacy development because these texts help expand vocabulary and background knowledge, while also teaching them the language and structure of informational text. “The evidence is compelling: We should involve students in informational text early in school—not only through such commonly mentioned practices as teaching text structure and vocabulary, but also by enacting the triad of reading real-world informational texts for real-world reasons in motivating contexts” (Duke, 2010, p. 70). In other words, students should be reading informational texts to enhance literacy development using authentic, engaging, and purposeful texts such as those found in Scholastic Magazines+.
2 These are just a few examples from the collection of over 30 Pre-K through grade 12 magazines offered by Scholastic Magazines+. For a complete list of Scholastic Magazines+ offerings, please visit: https://classroommagazines.scholastic.com/.
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SCHOLASTIC RESEARCH & VALIDATION
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