Read Washington is thrilled to present our next live webinar, The Science of Reading Levels, with Dr. Tim Shanahan, sponsored by The Reading League Washington and Lexia Learning. Join us on Saturday, October 15th at 10:00 A.M. PDT.

For more than 70 years, educators have espoused and adhered to the idea that students need to be taught reading at their so-called “instructional level.” The idea was that if texts were too easy or too hard for students, then they would not make optimum gains in learning to read. On the other hand, if placed properly in the right text levels (levels at which they could read with relatively high degrees of reading fluency and comprehension) then learning would be expected to progress at an appropriate pace. This approach had led to widely used assessment and instruction regimes that have turned out not to be in line with a “science of reading.” This presentation will explore how we got here and what the research says that we should be doing in terms of monitoring student reading progress, text levels, and teaching students to read text.