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Top Books in High School Too Easy?
By Deborah Williams
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The Huffington Post reports that a recent report shows that today’s high school students are reading books intended for children who are reading on a fifth grade level. “A compilation of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school shows that the average reading level of that list is 5.3 — barely above the fifth grade.“ The report by Renaissance Learning, Inc. collected the book-reading data for 2.6 million students in grades 1 – 12 from all 30 states and Washington, D.C. Renaissance Learning uses an ATOS readability formula that takes considers “several predictors: average sentence length, average word length, word difficulty level and total number of words in a book or passage.”
The Top 20 Books Read by High Schoolers (2010 – 2011):
- Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (ATOS book level 5.3)
- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (4.5)
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (5.6)
- Night, Elie Wiesel (4.8)
- The Last Song, Nicholas Sparks (5.1)
- Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins (5.3)
- Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (5.3)
- Animal Farm, George Orwell (7.3)
- Twilight, Stephenie Meyer (4.9)
- A Child Called “It”, Dave Pelzer (5.8)
- Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer (4.8)
- The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan (4.7)
- The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton (4.7)
- Dear John, Nicholas Sparks (5.5)
- Crank, Ellen Hopkins (4.3)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (6.9)
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (7.3)
- Lord of the Flies, William Golding (5.0)
- The Giver, Lois Lowry (5.7)
- Marked: A House of Night Novel, P.C. Cast (5.4)
The consequences for these adolescent reading habits are reasons for concern; reading scores remain low and on the decline:
- Record low last year on the critical reading portion of the SAT.
- Only 34% of students rated reading “proficient” on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress
“David Coleman, contributing author of the Common Core State Standards, notes that not only must students read more high quality informational text, they must also read books of increasing complexity as they get older. “
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