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The more students read, the better they'll read   So, why limit their reading to a pre-set reading level with limited titles available?  Students need opportunities to read easy books to build fluency  - This is ratified in Appendix A, Page 9,  of the CCSS standards.  We shouldn't have to define what level they should read at -- whether easy or hard -- for independent reading.  Students need experience reading complex text to improve their ability to decode meaning when they encounter difficult material - This is based on the research of Marilyn Jager Rand, PhD. Brown University Students will  shift from easy -->  hard  material if it's on a subject of their interest.  - So let them choose what they want and their innate curiosity will compel them to read and achieve understanding, thus raising their reading ability.  Students need curiosity to inspire reading.  They will either have natural curiosity or stirred up curiosity (stirred up by the educator)  Students need a reason to read that is not about 'assignment' - a quest for knowledge or an answer to find.    

"Prior knowledge is an essential part of the meaning making negotiated between interlocutors. In classrooms, too, students' prior knowledge is a key factor in students overall achievement and performances. Most often, those lacking this kind of knowledge always lag behind the rest. There are actually several ways teachers can determine how much prior knowledge students have in store before debuting a discussion or a lesson. The visual below created by Mia from anethicalisland outlines some very practical ways that you can use in your class to check for students' previous knowledge. Check it out"

Infographic showing research on the impact of school libraries on student achievment

Infographic showing research on the impact of school libraries on student achievment

"The average higher- achieving students read approximately three times as much a week as their lower-achieving classmates, not including out of school reading."-Richard Allington, What Works for Struggling Readers

"Out of Print highlights the sea change underway in the multi-billion dollar U.S. K-12 instructional materials market enabled by recent technology and intellectual property rights innovations. With a focus on the ultimate impact on student learning, the report provides examples of lessons learned from recent digital and open (OER) content initiatives by leading states and school districts and offers comprehensive recommendations for government, industry, and educators to ensure that the inevitable shift to digital instructional materials improves student achievement and engagement and efficiently uses scarce resources."

Renaissance Learning: * The top 20 books most widely read in grades 1-12, overall and by gender * The top 20 books most widely read by low- and high-achieving students * The top 10 nonfiction books and books for use across the curriculum Downloadable report (pdf)

Where administrators value strong library programs and can see them doing their part for student success, students are more likely to thrive academically. This is the over-arching conclusion that can be drawn from the latest study of the impact of school libraries-this one in Idaho. This study, conducted by the RSL Research Group, was contracted for by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and endorsed by the Idaho Department of Education.

"An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web."

"It was the best times, it was the worst of times…." This famous observation by Charles Dickens is certainly applicable to the current status of school library programs and school librarians. On the one hand, some programs are valued and receive ongoing support from their communities. Led by competent, effective school librarians, programs such as those recognized as meeting the criteria of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) National School Library Program of the Year Award, provide solid evidence of the positive impact of best practice on teaching and learning. On the other hand, the economic downturn, often combined with a lack of understanding or value for how school librarians and library programs contribute to student achievement, has led other communities to eliminate positions and to cut back, curtail, or get rid of once thriving programs.

"The significant increases in the usage, frequency and access to digital media in the classroom over the past several years, along with the research showing that integrating multimedia and technology into instruction can boost student achievement, is driving our strategy to produce the most effective media for learning,"