Research and Policy: Information Texts and the Common Core Standards: What Are We Talking about, Anyway?

This column responds to a recent push in education policy toward a curriculum that requires students to read and write more informational texts. Most evident in the now well-known Common Core State Standards, these policy moves echo, in some ways, a call by researchers for more informational texts, particularly in primary classrooms. In this column, the authors work to sort out the various ways that researchers and policy documents have defined terms like “informational texts” and “nonfiction.” In doing so, they hope to move toward more clarity and consistency in the use of such terms. The discussion in this column lays the groundwork for, and continues in, a future column (July, 2013) in which they review the research on instruction relevant to informational texts.