The quad text set framework can assist content teachers in building students' background knowledge, increasing their reading volume, and incorporating complex texts into instruction.A call for continued efforts to improve literacy outcomes for adolescents is standard fare, but exactly what adolescents should read, how much, and how are less clear. As former middle and high school teachers and current university-based literacy researchers, we take the stance that increasing the amount of challenging texts that middle and high school students read has the potential to improve literacy outcomes. However, we know that teachers are often unsure about how to link texts to other curricular objectives. We present a text set framework that allows teachers to plan instruction that meets disciplinary goals while also providing opportunities for students to build their background knowledge through reading. Starting With What We KnowWe started by considering the literature behind the use of text sets. We then thought through factors that impact both comprehension and instruction, including the effects of reading volume and difficulty, and how the use of text sets may help or hinder these challenges. We also considered the actual knowledge and motivational demands on adolescent readers tasked with learning content through high-volume work with texts. Figure 1 presents a visual depiction of the stressors that we saw that influence adolescent reading in school, potentially affecting both attitudes and achievement. We describe these factors to provide background for our decisions. Together, these research strands help teachers consider both students' knowledge and their thinking processes during reading, keeping teachers' attention squarely on what students need to know and do to learn from text.Finally, we developed an approach to text selection and sequencing that puts theory into classroom practice. We worked with teachers to develop texts sets and observed the implementation of our new framework in middle and high school content area classrooms.

Knowledge plays an inarguably critical role in reading comprehension. When considering the science of reading, it is important to engage with varying theoretical frameworks and empirical research that inform our collective understanding regarding the intersection of knowledge and literacy in K–12 classrooms. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to consider sociocultural and cognitivist perspectives on the role that knowledge plays throughout the reading process and to examine whose knowledge matters. Then, the authors address three tensions related to the role of knowledge in K–12 literacy instruction and offer research‐based perspectives on how educators, researchers, school leaders, parents, and community leaders can rethink knowledge to support students in learning from texts. First, the authors reframe the knowledge gap and suggest ways that teachers can privilege students’ knowledge as assets during literacy instruction. Second, the authors address the importance of supporting students in activating, integrating, and revising their knowledge during text processing and suggest evidence‐based instructional techniques that support students’ learning from texts. Finally, the authors contend that content knowledge is not the only type of knowledge that matters in reading and suggest how teachers can support readers in using other types of knowledge that are crucial to comprehension.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether easy or challenging versions of texts, when accompanied by different types of instructional support, improved adolescents' reading comprehension, particularly for students with below‐average reading comprehension. The authors examined 293 ninth‐grade students' reading comprehension of 24 leveled texts over a 12‐week intervention in which teachers were randomly assigned to one of two instructional strategies prior to reading: K‐W‐L or Listen‐Read‐Discuss. Students were randomly assigned within classes to read either easy or challenging versions of the texts, and students' text comprehension was assessed after each lesson. General comprehension was assessed before and after the intervention using the Gates–MacGinitie Reading Comprehension subtest. The authors analyzed the texts using Lexile Analyzer, Coh‐Metrix Text Easability Assessor, and TextEvaluator to compare aspects of concreteness, formality of language, cohesion, and familiarity across versions. Findings revealed that comprehension of the easy and challenging versions was similar for most students, but students in the K‐W‐L classrooms outperformed students in the Listen‐Read‐Discuss classrooms. Only a small subset of students who read significantly below average, many of whom were identified as English learners, benefited from reading the easier versions. The Coh‐Metrix and TextEvaluator tools indicated that the easier texts had more familiar vocabulary, greater lexical cohesion, fewer academic vocabulary words, and a more conversational tone, but similar grammatical cohesion and concreteness of words. The results suggest that most students, even if struggling with comprehension, can read challenging versions of texts when accompanied by instructional support.

Building content knowledge alongside the task of increasing literacy skills has become a goal for many elementary classrooms. Selecting and implementing texts for the literacy block that both increase content knowledge and develop students’ literacy skills alongside increasing motivation for reading is a daunting task. The authors share a strategic approach for selecting texts called the quad text set framework. This framework involves first selecting a target text, which is a challenging content‐related text, and then selecting easier texts, including visuals, to build background knowledge and a hook text to garner interest in the topic. The teacher then decides how to implement the texts to best support students’ content learning. The authors describe considerations for selecting and ordering texts for interdisciplinary units to maximize content learning and literacy and provide examples of how to implement quad text sets related to math, science, and social studies.

This study examined the relationship between adolescents' reading attitudes and comprehension to better understand the interplay between affective and cognitive factors for students with varying reading abilities. A comprehension proficiency assessment and the Survey of Adolescent Reading Attitudes were administered to 202 ninth graders. Findings indicated moderate correlations between reading achievement and recreational print reading attitudes. Small correlations were found between both academic print and digital text attitudes and reading achievement. No correlations were found between recreational digital text attitudes and achievement, although students demonstrated the most positive attitudes toward recreational digital texts. Students who read on or above grade level demonstrated better attitudes toward recreational print, academic print, and academic digital texts than students who read below grade level. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed, including the need for further exploration of the association between reading achievement and incorporating pleasure reading into the English curriculum. Additionally, given the positive attitudes displayed by both on/above grade-level readers and below grade-level readers toward recreational digital texts, implications of the social nature of reading instruction are discussed.