S6 E15 - What Does Research Say About Novel Study?

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Hello, hello, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn Seamer, coming to you from Tasmania, the land of the Palawa people. Today we're diving into a topic that's gained traction over the last couple of years: novel study.

All About Novel Study

In just about every teaching Facebook group, people are talking about novel study and how to make it work with their students. So this episode is devoted to novel study, where I'm addressing a few different questions.

• Where did it come from?
• Is it suitable for everyone?
• How do you fit it into your timetable,? And
• Is it actually evidence-based for the primary school?

Has novel study become one of the things that is popular and viewed as best practice without a strong evidence base? With this particular practice, have we fallen into the same trap as we did in the balanced literacy days? Something looks good and sounds good, so we adopt it, but we didn't recognise that it didn't have a strong evidence base. By the end of this episode, you will know the answer to that question.

It's Complex

Before we begin, I need to acknowledge that this episode is longer than our usual episodes, because it needs to be. This issue is a complex one, and for teachers and schools it can feel really high stakes. My purpose in sharing here is not to tell anyone what to do, but to give you sufficient information so that you and your team can answer the question: Are we making our decisions based on what research says and what we know is best for our students, or are we following a trend, not really understanding it? It's not my place to tell you what to do. I see my role as that of a partner to walk alongside leaders and teachers and help make decision-making about instruction easier. In order to do that, I have to give a topic appropriate consideration and give you as much information as I can without making it all overwhelming. So stick with this episode. Think about what resonates with you and what makes sense. Also notice what surprises you. After all, it's in discovering that something is not exactly as we thought that we learn. So let's dive in.

I'm going to start by saying that novel study can be a valuable item in our teaching kit bags, and then you might think well, what's the point of this episode? Stay with me, there's a lot more to that. Now I've taught with novels successfully in my own classroom, with great outcomes, and I know that many of you are as well. If you're expecting this episode to be anti-novel study, I'm sorry to disappoint. But if we take a step back and look at the nuance of this issue, and also look at how novel study has evolved, it seems to me from my reading that novel study as a source of instruction seems to be relatively recent in the way that we think about it.

The Old Contradicts the New

Now, in decades gone by, literacy blocks were divided into separate reading and writing hours, and this is still the case in many schools. Time allocated to reading focused on comprehension, centred on levelled text and comprehension strategies, and may have involved literature circles where students assumed roles to discuss text and share responses. And while this seemed engaging, this highly student-driven approach contradicted what we now know from cognitive science: that novices learn best through fully guided instruction. We're now aware that levelled text guided reading had the problem of not presenting challenging and rich enough texts that engage students with real literature. There just wasn't enough heavy lifting for the students to do the learning.

Literature circles, however, kind of did the complete opposite. This structure handballed the actual reading of the text to the students, often for homework, and then had them come in and have a student-centred discussion that they drove. Now this handballing the reading for homework seems to me to be the only way that you could have fit it all in, because if you had to read the text in the classroom as well as having all that discussion, you just wouldn't be able to make things happen.

My Own Side

In preparing for this podcast, I've thought quite a bit about the way I manage novel study in my own classroom. Yes, I chose a novel based on a variety of factors. However, we didn't do deep reading of the entire text. I used only selected passages for close reading, while other sections of the book were read as class read-alouds, particularly the less impactful ones. Trying to close read every part of a novel can see us spending really precious time examining lulls and transition points, time that could be better spent used for deeper comprehension or writing work. Looking back, I can also see that I wasn't addressing both reading and writing outcomes while using the novels, the work was focused squarely on comprehension, and I have to say that deep reading with active engagement of the text, where students were asked to interact directly with a text, did lead to better comprehension outcomes on normed assessment, which I was very pleased with. However, when I moved to using rich text as the stimulus for both reading comprehension and writing, I switched to shorter text, chosen for their suitability to align with the curriculum outcomes we were working towards. At the time I had no evidence base to reflect on. I did it because it felt right and I could see the outcomes in real time with my students. I now know that so much of what I was doing was actually reflected in research. In fact, there's a whole book about research for connecting reading and writing, and that's what it's called, Writing and Reading Connections: Bridging Research and Practice. This is an edited book with chapters written by people that you might recognise, like Timothy Shanahan, Steve Graham, Margaret McCowan. Knowing that we base our text-based units in the Resource Room on the research findings of respected and experienced researchers and practitioners means that our members can teach with confidence and we can have confidence that what we're providing is going to help get good outcomes.

At the moment, many teachers are using novel study as the primary focus of their text-based unit work. These units are coming from a variety of sources, including teachers writing their own. Some teachers are having success with this approach, but others are struggling with very real challenges. Now I hear from teachers who are almost at their wits end because they're trying to teach with novels in Year Three to Six and it's not working. They feel like they are failing their students because it's all too much and it's all too hard, and I don't want anyone to feel like they're failing their students.

Time Constraints

Some of the challenges teachers are facing with this approach are: time constraints is the major one. Teachers often find they don't have enough time to get through everything they'd hoped for, particularly when trying to connect reading and writing. So while the class may get through a text, it's often done at a pace that results in very surface level recall rather than the deep understanding we're aiming for.

Student Stamina

Next is the issue of student stamina. We know that we have a wide variety of students in our classes and we know that the context of schools changes from one school to another, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to managing student stamina. But teachers are telling me that students are running out of steam and focus before the end of the book, making it feel as if they're dragging them through the second half of a novel. There are also resource limitations to be considered. Not having enough copies of a book means teachers are often trying to teach novel study through read aloud only, and the challenge here is that students don't actually have eyes on the text, which limits their ability to engage directly with the language and structure that they need to be working with.

Struggling Learners

Finally, there's the question of struggling learners. Cohorts of students who are lower in literacy ability can find novel study particularly challenging, especially when they don't have the reading stamina or foundational skills to sustain engagement over weeks. Now I want to be really clear here. We don't deny age-appropriate text to students just because they have reading and writing challenges. Everyone can think about a text and talk about a text, and in this day and age of technology there are adjustments, such as audiobooks with text-to-speech software. However, asking students who struggle and who have to process most of the learning that you want to happen through working memory is a recipe for overwhelm and disengagement. In some schools, more than half of the students in a class are still learning to decode with the complex code. We must consider cognitive load in making decisions for instruction and feel good about doing that.

Why Novels?

So I'd like to ask the question now: why the push for novels? Why are teachers trying so hard to use only novels in their classrooms? Part of this comes from the idea that novels are somehow a superior form of text, an idea that I haven't quite been able to pin down to an exact date of introduction in our schools, but I suspect from the reading I've done that there's some coinciding with the introduction of whole language. What I've been able to find through looking at archives is that all through the 19th and first part of the 20th century, standard readers were used to engage students with rich text, so rich text has always been a focus. These books weren't complete novels but were anthologies of a range of texts. In the United States there were McGuffey Readers. Here in Australia we had Royal Readers and then Victorian Readers, and you can find the PDFs of these texts online, I can't share the text with you because I don't have the copyright for them, but if you Google Royal Readers PDF and Victorian Readers PDF, you'll find them.

Royal Readers

I'd like to read to you now from Royal Reader number four, which I presume was for use in Year Four.

As great variety as possible has been given to the contents of the present volume. Young people cannot be expected to dwell long on one subject, or even on one class of subjects. In the case of the mind, as of the body, judicious change is one of the best means of keeping up its vigor.

And I love that, "Judicious change is one of the best means of keeping up its vigor." So if we want to focus student attention and keep it focused, changing it up is one of the ways we can do that. So the reasoning for using a large range of shorter texts was related to student attention and engagement, principles that align remarkably well with what we know about cognitive load theory and attention.

Now these texts fell out of use in the 1960s and 70s, partly, it seems, because they didn't provide enough diversity in the reading materials. Pretty much once the White Australia Policy ended, Australia became a much more culturally diverse country and reading material needed to reflect that. These specific texts might have disappeared, but not the idea of anthologies of a variety of texts.

Now I was a primary student in the 1980s in New South Wales and we had the school magazine that was delivered regularly and had different names for different grades for the text from Three to Six. It seems that Victoria had a similar resource produced. Now you might still have some of these texts in your school. If you do, don't throw them out, see if you can use them. And the New South Wales school magazine is still a thing, although digitisation and software have replaced the old hard copies. Now I haven't been able to pin down a specific point when novels entered the picture in primary school, but from my reading and some inference it seems that novels were introduced somewhere in the 1980s and 90s because they were seen to represent a more complete, rich text. But I don't remember using a novel for reading instruction in primary school. I do recall having them read to us, which I think is a great thing, and we have a podcast episode on the read aloud. The point of this episode isn't to critique approaches of the past, but to show that text types have varied over time, based on pedagogical and philosophical ideas, and that collections of short texts for students to engage with in primary school have existed and been used successfully for over a century.

Back to the Research

Now this trip down memory lane has been fun, but let's turn to research to help us understand more about optimal text length, which is the issue at hand in this episode. So what does research have to say about this? Should we be using longer novels or shorter texts? Who's right on this issue? Here's where things get interesting and where I need to be completely honest with you. When I went searching for studies that validated the use of novels as the primary source of instruction over short stories, I came up empty-handed. I could not find any research that directly compared text length in terms of outcomes in either primary or secondary classrooms. In the research that I reviewed there was a statement: "There is no direct experimental study in Years Two to Six that isolates text length by comparing full-length novels to short stories while holding instruction constant." Now I don't mind telling you I was a little bit surprised by this. After all, I have seen so much messaging around the use of rich novels for instruction, I had assumed that there was a strong research base behind it, but it doesn't seem that there is. So if there isn't research indicating that novels yield better outcomes for students compared with shorter texts short stories, particularly in the primary school, well, what does the research say? And here's what I found in my reading.

Studies using shorter texts in primary grades have shown positive effects on comprehension. So Baumann and Bergeron found with Grade One students that using shorter text with story mapping instruction with children's stories showed significant comprehension gains. Fitzgerald and Spiegel found strong positive effects on comprehension when Grade Four students received explicit instruction in narrative structure using short stories. So we've got research there using short stories. Additionally, the influential study by Beck, McKeown, Sandora and Kucan compared two approaches to comprehension instruction with Year Five students that ran for two years. Their research found that students who experienced what they called a content model characterised by close reading with strategically placed teacher-facilitated discussion during text reading had higher levels of independent recall than those who experienced just strategy instruction. Importantly, this study included teachers teaching social studies who were using passages with defined stopping and starting points.

It's also important to remember that the focus of this study wasn't text length, it was an approach to comprehension instruction. So we can't say that shorter texts are better because we just don't have the research showing that. We can say that there is research showing that we can get great comprehension outcomes with shorter, complete texts. As Oakhill, Cain and Elbro emphasise in their really fantastic comprehension handbook, we need deeper understanding rather than surface-level coverage. So it would appear that the most important factor is deeper engagement with a good text rather than having the text that's of the perfect length.

Research on Novels

So let's now look specifically at what research has shown about novels and, of course, I can't share every study known to man with you. I'm choosing ones that most closely address the questions I was asking. In reviewing available research, it's important to know that most research on reading with novels has focused on secondary students. It's also important to know that comprehension was the primary focus and there wasn't a look at how we use a novel to integrate reading and writing instruction. So why that's important is that if we're trying to integrate reading and writing, we have to remember that the studies, like the one I'm about to share with you, focused only on comprehension in the time allowed.

A 2019 study by Sullivan and Colleagues, Jane Oakhill being one of them, focused on secondary students and used either a fast read of novels or a fast read and other comprehension focused structures. Now, a fast read was defined as reading two whole novels over a 12-week term. I'm going to read directly from the peer-reviewed article about the study now so that we know what we're talking about. What was the instruction that happened?

It included: work on reading strategies, predicting clarifying questioning, summarising and text connections, comprehension monitoring and inference, applying knowledge of self, world and text in guided reading groups and whole class, modelling and think alouds. Additionally, guidelines required establishing regular dialogic talk, class and group within ground rules, teaching story structure with graphic organisers, strategy for vocabulary development and reading entire texts, combining teacher read aloud in class with students reading aloud in groups for fluency and engagement, enabling students to form situation models of the text.

So that's quite a broad range of structures being used. This was done in about two and a half hours per week, so done in shorter chunks across a week. The text read were on average 200 pages long and were considered robust and substantial for the Year Eight students participating in the study. So keep that in mind, that these were secondary students, they weren't Year Three and Four.

The results of the study showed that this style of instruction was effective, particularly for students who struggled, and that's great news. The insistence on whole text being read rather than excerpts is mirrored in other research that I came across. The focus on dialogic talk and engagement also mirrors what other research has shown, including the Beck, McKeown, Kucan, Sandora study.

So what we have is two terrific studies: one focused on short texts, the other focused on novels, where the critical factor in instruction was the quality of the text, high quality discussion and thinking, vocabulary building and other structures. The text length was not the question here. So what are we supposed to do with this information? How does knowing about this help us make decisions in our schools? Timothy Shanahan, in his blog post about teaching with novels, puts it really nicely. He describes being a two-handed reading specialist on this issue. On one hand, novels could help students develop reading stamina and provide sustained engagement with character and plot development. On the other hand, shorter works allow for much broader exposure to different authors, literary devices and writing styles within the same time frame. As Shanahan notes, "Let's be honest, there are only so many novels that kids can read. Short stories magnify the possibilities here." So he suggests that, while novels have their place, we should balance them against a more aggressive and intentional use of excerpts and shorter works, and to me this makes perfect sense.

Practical Considerations and Reality

I'd like to finish this episode with practical considerations that keep us in the realm of evidence-based, while responding to the reality of schools and the constraints of the average classroom. So my key considerations for making decisions on this matter are: always aim for a rich text that has depth of theme, language or structure, regardless of the length. Quality texts will also yield better outcomes, whether they are long or short. In the Resource Room, we lean into texts that are in the public domain and written by great authors like Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, and L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz. Texts that aren't rich in vocabulary, theme and sentence structure simply won't provide the stretch needed to develop as strong readers. There's just not enough heavy lifting in them for the students to have desirable difficulty.

Your Student Knowledge

Your knowledge of your students is critical in this decision making.Text selection isn't about what someone else said or about what our favourite books are as the teacher, the decision is about presenting text that creates desirable difficulty, not overwhelming learning environments for our kids. Attention spans and current capabilities matter. In my opinion, it's better to use a short text that's beautiful and rich and have full engagement with it than drag students through a novel if they don't have the stamina or your timetable doesn't allow the time for you to slow down and go deep. This isn't dumbing down expectations, it's responding to reality.

Prioritise Every Student Having a Text

We need to prioritise physical accessibility of the text, so I would encourage you to have a preference for text where you have enough copies for each student to interact directly with. This enables everyone to read with whatever support is necessary for them. I also, as a teacher, prefer text that students can annotate, circle, underline and highlight to focus attention. One text displayed on a screen for everyone isn't going to get you the same focus as everyone having something in front of them. This is another reason that we opt for texts that are in the public domain or we write original texts. You can print as many copies as you like and give one to every child. You will also have a PDF that can be used in a text-to-speech reader. There isn't a one-size-fits-all rule here, but if we want students to read more texts, they actually have to be reading more texts, not just listening or watching. And the other thing here, if we want students reading more texts, then the rest of our curriculum has to do more heavy lifting for the reading. Bring text in to every subject area, with perhaps the exception of PE, but you know what, you could still bring a small text in, instruction about how to play soccer.

Consider Cognitive Load

We also have to consider cognitive load. We need to carefully manage how many new elements we include in instruction and ensure that students have time for sufficient practice and rehearsal. A shorter text may allow for deeper, more thorough instruction that builds the kind of robust comprehension we're aiming for. Students need to have the opportunity for repetition, for practice, for processing. Shorter, complete texts also allow for us to fully integrate writing instruction within the text-based unit in a way that doesn't leave teachers feeling anxious about fitting it all in and doesn't leave us dragging the students by a rope through the planning. When we integrate writing, we need a lot more time and practice than we do if we're just focusing on reading, so that needs to be considered in the decisions that we make.

Embrace Variety

Finally, I would encourage everyone to embrace variety. Using a range of texts allows for broader content coverage and maintains student interest and engagement. It also means that you can strategically choose when you'll use longer texts across the year. In terms two and four, when you know that you need assessment completed for reporting, you might opt for a full unit on a shorter text. In term three, though, when you know your students, and you know that there's no reporting, that might be the optimum time for you to lean into a really weighty novel, because you know that you have the time and the space to do it justice.

As I have done in my own classroom, and as indicated in the research I've shared, you can always choose to use part of a novel for deep reading and then use the rest as a read aloud text. That's exactly what a team I was coaching did when writing their own novel study. We planned the rigorous part of the unit to take them to the point in a book where students will then complete a summative assessment. And it wasn't an easy assessment, it was robust and required heavy thinking, but they didn't have to read the whole text to get there. They then read the remainder of the text to the students in the afternoons and this worked beautifully, the students were able to enjoy the texts. The teachers were able to give the students the rich learning experience. It was a real win-win. Now, this approach honours both the benefits of sustained text reading and the reality of instructional time constraints and student capabilities.

I haven't recorded this episode to say that novel studies are bad and we shouldn't be using novels for instruction. Rather, I want to suggest that we broaden the scope of texts to bring variety of content for the sake of stamina, interest and alignment with the reality of time constraints. Also, we all know that we have a really crowded curriculum, and so, if we are expecting to meet all of the curriculum outcomes, more texts could be a good way to go.

I also really want to reassure teachers who are struggling to get through novel units that there isn't something wrong with you. You're not a bad teacher. You aren't going against research if you choose to mix things up. It isn't that novel study is the superior form of instruction. It's that it is one form of instruction. There isn't research saying that the most impactful way to teach comprehension with literature is with novels, and please remember that most research that includes novels has been done with students in the secondary school, not the primary school. So while we can keep an eye on what that research showed, we also have to remember that our context matters.

In the absence of specific research telling us what the optimum text length is, we need to turn to what we do have: evidence showing that shorter text can be used very effectively for comprehension development, that cognitive load is real and that tailoring instruction to the needs of the students in front of us isn't shortchanging them. It's ensuring that every instructional minute is rich and engaging. After all, what's the point of spending weeks trying to convince students they should pay attention and be excited about a text that they lost interest in two weeks into the unit?

Trust Your Judgement

I know that what I'm saying today might be challenging for some teachers who formed a vision of robust, evidence-based practice around novel study, but at the end of the day, our professional judgement about instruction based on what we're seeing in our students will take us a long way. Common sense is usually a good part of the answer to the questions we're asking. Remember, evidence-informed instruction sits at the intersection of what research has to share with us about a topic, what our professional judgement, based on expertise and a history of strong outcomes, says works and, most importantly, on the impact on our students. When we have those three things in alignment, then we know that we're probably on the right track.

Do students need to be reading more texts? Yes.

Do we need to ensure that there's sufficient depth to those texts? Yes.

Should we promote engagement with high quality texts that create desirable difficulty? Of course.

Is there only one way to make this happen? No.

The goal isn't to find one perfect text length, but to make thoughtful decisions based on our students' needs, our instructional goals, the time we have available and what the research indicates are the most impactful factors. Let's give ourselves and our students a little bit of a break and reflect on what the research does and does not say about what robust reading instruction looks like.

If novels are perfect for your students,

• you're able to use them,
• the units are rolling along,
• you're not feeling strapped for time,
• your students aren't overwhelmed,
• you can see the outcomes,
• you can measure the outputs.

Fantastic, keep doing what you're doing.

But if you've had a niggling feeling that novel study might not be the whole picture, then please know that you're right. There is more to be considered. Now we'll link to Timothy Shanahan's blog post in the transcript of this episode on our site so you can have a read for yourself what he has to say. Ultimately, it's not the length of the text that's the defining factor in student outcomes. It's the quality of the text and the quality of the instruction that matters most. Thank you so much for sticking with me until the end of this episode. I want you to not press stop now. Keep listening until after I finish speaking, because there's quite a fun little song that you might enjoy after listening to this episode. Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References:

Philippakos, Z. A. & Graham, S. (2023). Writing and Reading Connections: Bridging Research and Practice. Guilford Press.

The Royal readers. No. 4. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2144871

Baumann, J. F. & Bergeron, B. S. (1993). Story Map Instruction Using Children's Literature: Effects on First Graders' Comprehension of Central Narrative Elements. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862969309547828

Fitzgerald, J., & Spiegel, D. L. (1983). Enhancing children's reading comprehension through instruction in narrative structure. Journal of Reading Behavior, 15(2), 1–17.

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Sandora, C., Kucan, L., & Worthy, J. (1996). Questioning the Author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. The Elementary School Journal, 96(4), 385–414. https://doi.org/10.1086/461835

Oakhill, J., Cain, K. & Elbro, C. (2014). Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A handbook. Routledge. 

Sutherland, J., Westbrook, J., Oakhill, J., & Sullivan, S. (2023). An immersive, ‘Faster Read’: a pilot, mixed-method study, developing whole-text reading comprehension and engagement with adolescent struggling readers. Research Papers in Education, 39(5), 774–796. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2023.2238285

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