Elfrieda H. Hiebert

TextProject.org

Building students’ knowledge is an important way to support their future reading. Simply stated, the more readers know about the topics of texts, the better their comprehension and learning from texts (e.g., Alexander, Kulikowich, & Schulze, 1994; Gasparinatou & Grigoriadou, 2013). We discuss two obstacles that have hampered an emphasis on knowledg...

We report on a meta-analysis designed to test the theory that instruction that involves direct teaching of academic vocabulary and teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words develops students’ abilities to infer new words’ meanings and builds students’ overall vocabulary knowledge. We meta-analyzed 39 experimental and quasi-exper...

The science of reading has captured the attention of educators, policy makers, and the public. Elfrieda H. Hiebert recounts some of what she’s learned from her recent exploration of the topic. She has found that research evidence tends to fall into three categories: research that provides unequivocal conclusions, research that holds promise for sol...

Researchers disagree about the value of controlling the decodability of texts for students with reading difficulty, specifically what type of text they should read: decodable texts (words limited to taught patterns), nondecodable texts (those not limited by instruction), or both . We analyzed the effects of reading intervention for elementary‐age s...

Published in the Spring 2024 Issue of the The California Reader: English orthography, described as quasi-regular, exhibits variability in the correspondences between letters and sounds, particularly with vowels. Proficiency in reading demands automaticity in connecting letters and sounds, necessitating systematic phonics instruction. However, the...

This study analyzed the prevalence and characteristics of low-frequency and rare words, together described as rarer words, in elementary-level texts, examining both narrative and expository materials to assess their vocabulary demands. By mapping the nature of shifts in rarer words across grade levels and text types, this research aimed to better u...

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to ad...

A key consideration in providing effective reading instruction is the selection of a text. However, little is known about how preservice teachers are prepared to understand text complexity and how they leverage that knowledge in their text selection practices. Accordingly, this design/development study explored how preservice teachers (n = 81) gain...

In this article, the authors describe CATER (Computer‐Assisted Texts for Early Reading), an innovation that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create texts for beginning reading instruction tailored to the interests, strengths, and learning needs of individual readers. The authors present an overview of CATER and share their findings from their w...

Ensuring effective texts for student reading acquisition is a shared goal. This paper addresses the efficacy of decodable and leveled texts, their word features, and outcomes of reorganizing texts by vowel patterns and topics. Sparse evidence supports one text type's superiority in building a strong reading foundation. Further, the decoding demands...

Discussed the need for more research on decodable texts.

The English lexicon is large, the size of students' vocabulary is consequential for learning, and time in classrooms is short. Educators are confronted with the question: Which of the many words in English should be taught. This review builds on and extends Nagy and Hiebert’s (2011) framework for selection of words for direct instruction. In partic...

This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study, w...

Reading instruction for young Arabic speakers presents challenges for textbook publishers and teachers. In the present study, the authors conduct an analysis at the word level of four multidisciplinary textbooks for reading instruction in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer the following questions: What are the most common words...

Texts classified according to guided reading levels (GRL) are ubiquitous in US beginning reading classrooms. This study examined features of texts across three grade bands (kindergarten, early first grade, final first grade) and the 10 GRLs within these bands. The 510 texts came from three programs with different functions in beginning reading inst...

Much of the attention given to literacy, of late, has focused on ensuring that students can read, without consideration to what they are given to read. Kristin Conradi Smith & Elfrieda H. Hiebert discuss four general aspects of the texts used in elementary classrooms – text complexity, text type (narrative versus informational), text format (paper...

In this essay, we discuss how teachers and students can use children's literature and literature‐based activities to intentionally foster hope. The previous years have proved to be challenging on many fronts. Teachers of all levels are focusing on ways to support academic development in an oft‐shifting context. Drawing on research using bibliothera...

According to interpretations of results from the latest oral reading fluency (ORF) study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (White et al., 2020), fourth‐grade students who score below the basic standard require interventions that focus on word recognition, phonological decoding, and fluency. Before such mandates for studen...

The Common Core State Standards emphasize the need for U.S. students to read complex texts. As a result, the level of word complexity for primary‐level texts is important, particularly the dimensions of and changes in complexity between first grade and the important third‐grade high‐stakes testing year. In this study, we addressed word complexity i...

The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. Seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 were examined. Four categories of academic vocabulary (science, mathematics, social studies, and general acad...

Forward to Teaching with Children’s Literature. Describes the importance of using children's literature in addition to instructional texts in building engagement and proficiency in literacy learners.

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and...

This study describes the features of words known and unknown by first graders of different proficiency levels in six instances of an oral reading fluency assessment: three in winter and three in spring. A sample of 411 students was placed into four groups (very high, high, middle, and low) based on their median correct words per minute in spring. E...

A group of words, labeled the core vocabulary, can be expected to be prominent across all texts. Scholarship made possible by digital databases of words and new analytic systems has shown that approximately 2,500 morphological families account for most of the words in texts—an average of 91.5% of all words in the Common Core State Standards exempla...

Forward to the book Developing conceptual knowledge through oral and written language: Perspectives and practices, Pre K-12. Discusses the need for selecting and curating texts to use within English language arts program that develop knowledge, instead of being a random selection of texts as is the case in many reading programs.

Research shows that vocabulary is the best support for students’ comprehension of narrative and information texts. Often, vocabulary instruction focuses on a few target words in specific texts. However, to understand the many new words in complex texts students need to know how words work. This book, written by an award-winning authority on reading...

English’s prolific vocabulary and its essential role in comprehension make insight into the lexicon of schoolbooks essential to effective instruction. Prior research has shown that 2,500 morphological families with lead words that appear 10 times or more per million words (Hiebert, Goodwin, & Cervetti, 2018) account for 91.5% of total words in scho...

Standards for English/Language Arts (ELA) address the processes of reading but rarely, if ever, attend to the content with which these processes should be applied. Yet students’ knowledge of a text’s topic is a strong predictor of their comprehension (O’Reilly, Wang, & Sabatini, 2019). This presentation explores the use of semantic clusters as a me...

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) have mandates that call for third graders’ retention based on proficiency on end-of-year summative assessments (Weyer, 2018). This study is the first analysis of 101 released passages from 26 states and two consortia (PARCC, Smarter Balanced) to answer the question: What is required to reach the t...

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have mandates that call for third graders’ retention based on proficiency on end-of-year summative assessments (Weyer, 2018). But what, exactly, is involved in being a third-grade reader, according to the large-scale assessments? This study examines the vocabulary of released passages of states’ third-gr...

This study examined how comprehension-based silent reading rate (CBSRR) is affected by grade, genre, and text position. Second and fourth graders read 2 grade-specific passages (one narrative, one informational) in 4 sections, each followed by 4 comprehension questions. Analyses of rate with a criterion level of comprehension showed higher performa...

This exploratory study was designed to evaluate the interplay of students’ rate and comprehension in independent silent reading of accessible text, within the frameworks of the Simple View of Reading and the RAND Reading Study Group. In the first phase, 61 sixth graders were given a reading test (GRADE), a motivation questionnaire, and an on-screen...

Purpose: Proper names have typically not been distinguished from other words in literacy instruction and research, though they are semantically different and may have other distinctive properties. This paper examines the prevalence of proper names across grade levels in school texts. Method: The 19,461 words from the Educator’s Word Frequency Guide...

Published in Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy, and the Arts, 6(1), 8-43. In this article, we explore some of the challenges and trade-offs of defining and conceptualizing instructional text. A richer and more complex definition of literacy requires a complex theoretical framing of the “multiple realities” that exist within this frami...

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students’ performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and pop...

English’s prolific vocabulary and the essential role of vocabulary in comprehension make knowledge about the lexicon of schoolbooks central to effective instruction. Research has shown that approximately 4,000 morphological families (MF) account for 93% of words in texts from Grades K through college-and-career-ready. The present study considers th...

Purposes of the Study Characteristics of Passages and Words Might words vary in the characteristics that contribute to decoding challenges? A proposal for a scale How common are words of more than one morpheme and syllable? Summary and Follow-Up Studies What types and how many of derived and inflected words are found in 1 st and 3 rd grade texts? B...

In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding consensus...

Prompted by the advent of new standards for increased text complexity in elementary classrooms in the USA, the current integrative review investigates the relationships between the level of text difficulty and elementary students’ reading fluency and reading comprehension. After application of content and methodological criteria, a total of 26 rese...

Texts are a central part of reading. Yet our understandings of appropriate text features and distributions of text diets at different points in students’ reading development are limited. The thesis of the essay is that, if the trajectory of struggling readers is to change, attention is needed to the features of texts and students’ text diets, espec...

his study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1Ð6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade pro...

This study addresses the distribution of words in texts at different points of schooling. The first aim was to identify a core vocabulary that accounts for the majority of the words in texts through the lens of morphological families. Results showed that 2,451 morphological families, averaging 4.61 members, make up the core vocabulary of school tex...

This study compared the effects of two types of phonetically regular texts on first-grade English Language Learners' literacy learning. In one text type, phonetically regular rimes (PRR) were emphasized. The second text type-labeled the phonetically regular phoneme (PRP) condition-focused on consistency in the individual phoneme-grapheme correspond...

Recent educational reform initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) largely fail to address the needs—or tap into the unique resources—of students who are developing literacy skills in both English and a home language. This book discusses ways to meet the challenges that current standards pose for teaching emergent bilingual studen...

In this foreword to the special issue of the Journal of Education cele- brating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading (BNR) (Ander- son, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985), we share the backstory of the making of BNR. We view our role as that of commentators, narrators, and...

This chapter views the literacy learning opportunities provided for English Learners through the lens of textbooks. This examination of ELA textbooks--specifically those designated for interventions with ELs--moves through three steps. The first step involves a review of research on elements that contribute to effective literacy experiences, in par...

Learning to read and write are critically important goals for all children. Some children achieve these goals with little difficulty and progress rapidly in school. Other children struggle with reading and writing throughout their school years. Teach Your Child to Read & Spell is a tutoring or parent guide that uses open-access material to support...

Part of a project to develop an authentic, valid, online, and practical measure of comprehension-based silent reading rate (CBSRR; Hiebert, Samuels, & Rasinski, 2012) for grades 4 and above. Comprehension-based silent reading is comprehending during reading (i.e., without rereading other than regressions). CBSRR is difficult to measure because it c...

Comprehending text, while silently reading at an appropriate rate, defines proficient reading. Measuring silent reading rate with comprehension, however, has been beset with problems. A new online assessment promises to provide robust informa>on on both comprehension and reading rate in silent reading—a construct that we label as Silent Reading Flu...

The Common Core raises the stature of texts to new heights, creating a hubbub. The fuss is especially messy at the early grades, where children are expected to read more complex texts than in the past. But early-grades teachers have been given little actionable guidance about text complexity. The authors recently examined early-grades texts to disc...

The present study measured the comprehension-based silent reading efficiency of U.S. students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Students read standardized grade-level passages while an eye movement recording system was used to measure reading rate, fixations (eye stops) per word, fixation durations, and regressions (right-to-left eye movements) per...

The purpose of the study was to address possible text-complexity shifts across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core-reading program. The anthologies of one publisher’s seven first-grade core-reading programs were examined using computer-based analytics, dating from 1962 to 2013. Variables were Overall Text-Complexity...

When assessed in silent reading modes, a majority of an American grade cohort fails to attain a proficient level. The assumption is typically made that students’ performances on the NAEP and other assessments reflect problems with word recognition. This assumption promotes interventions that emphasize phoneme-grapheme patterns. However, data on stu...

Presents a model of scholarly impact that examines digital presence and the contributions made to both the academy and to practice and policy.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) focus on building student capacity to read complex texts. The Standards provide an explicit text complexity staircase that maps text levels to grade levels. Furthermore, the Standards articulate a rationale to accelerate text levels across grades to ensure students are able to rea...

This study examined the relationships between silent and oral reading fluency and comprehension. Findings indicated that fourth grade students had consistent levels of comprehension in both reading modes. Students of all reading levels showed a similar pattern across the segments of a text set in both oral and silent reading—a gradual increase in r...

Over the past 50 years, substantial changes have occurred in the texts used for the instruction for beginning reading. This article analyzes four prominent perspectives that have most influenced beginning reading instruction texts in the United States over this period. This article examines changes in beginning reading texts in relation to changes...

This study considers the distribution of semantic clusters in the words of reading textbooks and the prominent word features of semantic clusters (i.e., age of acquisition, abstractness-concreteness, and part of speech). All of the rare words of the grade-three components of three core reading programs were placed into megaclusters (Hiebert, 2011)....

This chapter provides an overview for each of the topics addressed in the three sections of this book: (a) stamina is a major challenge for many American students, (b) silent reading proficiency depends on extensive reading opportunities, and (c) appropriate instructional applications can increase students’ silent reading proficiency. First, howeve...

Three critical aspects of the topic of stamina in silent reading are addressed by the chapters in this volume: (a) describing the problem and the construct of stamina, (b) describing evidence that stamina can be increased through intentional instruction, and (c) describing the next steps in the design of instruction and research. Briefly describes...

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics—length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness—that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to expla...

Most students can read, but they don’t have rigorous independent reading habits. What many students lack is stamina—the ability to persevere in reading texts on their own. Three critical aspects of the topic of stamina in silent reading are addressed by the chapters in this volume: (a) describing the problem and the construct of stamina, (b) descri...

The premise of this chapter, as is the case with the entire volume, is that solutions to the problems of the present can benefit from an understanding of the efforts of the past. The current policy to ramp up text levels illustrates a problem where all existing knowledge needs to be brought to bear—whether that knowledge comes from theoretically de...

Preface to Research-Based Practices for Teaching Common Core Literacy. This volume is based on the premise that remembering what we’ve learned is fundamental to designing solutions to current problems. As a field, we have produced a wealth of knowledge about reading development over the past half century. In this volume, a generation of scholars, a...

This one-of-a-kind resource will be invaluable to every teacher educator, every curriculum director, and every literacy coach, whether or not they must meet Common Core Standards. Bringing together perspectives from literacy luminaries, each addressing their specialty, this book offers an accessible fund of rich practices in literacy instruction. T...

This study examined the relationships between silent and oral reading fluency and comprehension. Findings indicated that fourth grade students had consistent levels of comprehension in both reading modes. Students of all reading levels showed a similar pattern across the segments of a text set in both oral and silent reading—a gradual increase in r...

Much attention has been paid to the call in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), 2010) for more reading and writing of informational text in the elementary grades. Indeed, in the context of the CCSS, informational text is on even footi...

Investigated the causes of poor silent reading fluency and comprehension in 4th and 7th grade poor readers by examining the relationships between reading rate, word recognition, and automaticity on silent reading comprehension, and vocabulary knowledge on silent reading rate.

A survey was sent to primary-grade teachers across the United States in an effort to give voice to teachers’ opinions about the important features that contribute to text complexity for young children. The responses to our survey revealed that primary-grade teachers emphasized word decodability, word frequency, pictures, and word meanings, among ot...

The Common Core State Standards represent the first standards document to address whether students are able to read progressively more complex texts as they progress across the grades. This article gives an overview of the three components of the model of text complexity that were identified in Appendix A of the Standards and also were the basis fo...

The purpose of this article is to understand the function, logic, and impact of qualitative systems for analyzing text complexity, focusing on their benefits and imperfections. We identified two primary functions for their use: (a) to match texts to reader ability so that readers read books that are within their grasp, and (b) to unearth, and then...

Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards makes the claim that K-12 reading texts have decreased in text difficulty over the past 50 years, despite an increased need to be able to read more complex texts. This presentation examines the evolving expectations of kindergarten from 1960-2014. Examples of typical kindergarten reading texts during th...

The challenges of identifying and addressing the features that contribute to text difficulty have become more pressing as schools begin to use the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to shape their instruction. Indeed, the major focus of the CCSS English Language Arts (ELA) standards is that, over their school careers, students encounter and become...

The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three hundred fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified...

Recounts how an encyclopedia enlarged her life by giving her a view into the world beyond her small childhood rural community.

Describes the development of a database of morphological families of core vocabulary and a tool that can be used to analyze the vocabulary used within texts.

In this study, the student texts and teacher guides of two reading intervention programs for at-risk, first-grade students were analyzed and compared: Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) and Scott Foresman’s My Sidewalks (MS). The analyses drew on the framework of available theory and research on beginning texts developed by M...

This article is designed to provide teachers with guidelines on what to consider when evaluating whether texts are at appropriate levels of complexity for purposes and students in their classrooms. Specifically, the question addressed is: What should teachers be looking for in selecting texts that are appropriate in complexity for their students?

The distinguishing feature of the English/Language Arts Common Core standards is Standard 10: whether students are reading progressively more complex texts across the grades. This goal is both worthy and necessary but has several potential negative consequences for struggling readers. How can an understanding of these assumptions help teachers sele...

Examines the type of words that are taught within reading programs and their occurrence within program texts. Earlier reading programs taught words that supported word recognition, while current programs teach words in order to support knowledge of word meanings. Examination of reading texts from the past 50 years reveal that students are exposed t...

This volume is an amalgam of the Frankly Freddys posted at TextProject.org from 2005 to 2014. Each column was intended to stand alone. However, when clustered topically, the columns coalesced into five topics in literacy learning and instruction that have been central to my work: text complexity; vocabulary and morphological awareness; beginning re...

Discusses how words are used within narrative and informational texts. Students can often capitalize on their existing knowledge to learn the meanings of unknown words within narrative texts. These words often add nuanced understanding to known concepts. In contrast, the unique words typically used within informational texts are often conceptually...

Published as an online exclusive as part of Educational Leadership 71(3). In this article, Elfrieda H. Hiebert argues that incorporating articles will transform students' reading in these five ways: increased reading, greater background knowledge, a feeling of success with challenging texts, proficiency with a reading task they can engage in their...

The presence of a new standard on text complexity raises the question of how much harder the assessment texts will be from the typical texts of classrooms. Discusses evidence that suggests that in most cases core-reading instructional texts complex enough for the majority of students. Because students will need to read these texts on their own duri...

In this chapter we consider three assumptions about the view of text complexity as operationalized by the CCSS. We are concerned that these assumptions, if left unexamined, could increase the achievement gap as they become part of state and national policies. At the outset, we emphasize that we support strongly the goal of increased reading of comp...

The purpose of this review is to examine the function, logic, and impact of qualitative systems, with a focus on understanding their beneits and imperfections. We identify two primary functions for their use: (a) to match texts to reader ability so that readers read books that are within their grasp and (b) to unearth, and then scafold, those featu...

This study measured the comprehension-based silent reading rate (reading rate with comprehension) of U.S. students at Grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 with grade-level passages (at both the pre-CCSS and the accelerated CCSS levels) 2011 and compares these performances with data on a 1960 sample (Taylor, 1965). Comprehension-based silent reading rates...

The aim of this chapter is to provide teachers with an understanding of why and how movement up the Common Core’s staircase of text complexity begins with a focus on the current texts of the elementary school. To accomplish this aim, the chapter addresses three topics: (a) the distribution of vocabulary in texts, (b) students’ performances with the...

Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students’ capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process—the Text Complexity Multi-Index (TCMI)—that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in increasing capaci...

An electronic interview with The Utah Journal of Literacy that also includes quotations from Hiebert's writings. Hiebert discusses her concerns regarding text complexity and teachers' identification and selection of texts for their students that fall within the Lexile bands identified by the Common Core recommendations. Hiebert notes that readabili...

The Common Core Standards for the English Language Arts (CCSS) provide explicit guidelines matching grade-level bands (e.g., 2–3, 4–5) with targeted text complexity levels. The CCSS staircase accelerates text expectations for students across Grades 2–12 in order to close a gap in the complexity of texts typically used in high school and those of co...

(Published inAmerican Reading Forum Annual Yearbook [Online]. Vol. 33.) This article argues that the current emphasis on college and career readiness by high school graduation fails to recognize the dynamic needs of adults in reading development across the lifespan. A model for college reading programs is designed, drawing on evidence that reading...