Research and Policy: Lessons from Research on Young Children as Readers of Informational Texts

Though in recent years there has been an increased emphasis on the presence and use of informational texts in the early years of schooling, classroom pedagogical practices remain stuck in autonomous models of literacy. Pedagogies driven by high-stakes test preparation point students toward single, assumedly correct, understandings of informational texts—a reading practice that can undermine the goal of developing children into critical consumers and producers of information. Drawing on the past 25 years of research in the field, this article makes the case for educators to build pedagogical supports that nurture children’s diverse and sophisticated sense-making practices: analyzing linguistic structures particular to the informational genre, reading complex image forms, constructing word-image relationships, raising and answering conceptual inquiries, and critically questioning textual authority.—