“Making Sure the Books Check Every Box”: Preservice Teachers Learning to Select Texts for Reading Instruction

Abstract

ABSTRACT A key consideration in providing effective reading instruction is the selection of a text. However, little is known about how preservice teachers are prepared to understand text complexity and how they leverage that knowledge in their text selection practices. Accordingly, this design/development study explored how preservice teachers (n = 81) gained declarative knowledge of text complexity, procedural knowledge of text selection practices, and conditional knowledge of activity, reader, and text considerations in their teacher education program. Findings indicate that following a two-course reading methods sequence in which they selected texts for small group instruction, typically performing preservice teachers gave the most attention to activity considerations (e.g. lesson-to-text match, instructional sequence) and the least attention to reader considerations (e.g. student interest). When noting text features teachers considered important, they described word-level features such as multisyllabic words, vocabulary, and decodability as most influencing text complexity. Furthermore, preservice teachers who held more declarative knowledge of text complexity tended to be more critical of text leveling systems whereas those with less knowledge of text complexity tended to view levels as an acceptable method of selecting texts. Together these findings suggest an emergent learning continuum on the topic of text selection for teacher education.