Test Passage Instruction Essay

Test passage instruction also affects students’ opportunities to learn about the purposefulness of reading. Reading comprehension is a purpose-driven practice (Duke et al., 2011). Readers read for many reasons, including to get better at reading (a common purpose in classrooms), to build new knowledge, to consider a new perspective on an issue, to try on a new identity, to impress someone they like, or to simply have an enjoyable time.

However, when students are regularly exposed to test passages in their reading instruction, they mostly read for purposes such as answering the questions correctly, getting a good grade, or maybe even keeping their school and teachers from getting into trouble for continuing to score poorly. At best, students may assume that the purpose for reading a passage is to understand it thoroughly. The latter is a good start, but it still misses the mark if we want students to understand the broad utility of reading in their lives inside and outside of school. Readers would benefit more from engagement in purposeful reading of high-quality children's literature across many genres.
When Annotation Requirements Stand In for Strategic Reading

For example, students are often required to stop and write a main idea statement at the end of each paragraph, even when these notes are not useful for their thinking at that point in the text. Students are also asked to mark evidence in a text to support their answers to test-formatted questions (Davis & Willson, 2015). In our conversations with teachers, these annotations are often referred to as “using your strategies” or “showing proof,” terms that we believe give undue legitimacy to behaviors that are not necessarily