Reading for academic content!

The common core standards call for important new attention to the skills needed for successful reading in  history, social studies, science and technology.

All the reading sections start from ten college and career readiness anchor standards. We see those ten in K-5 literary reading, K-5 informational reading, and 6-12 English language arts reading, each time broken out into grade-by-grade versions of what students need to master on the way to being fully prepared by the end of high school. 

For selected subjects, each of the ten anchor standards appear again,with a small twist to focus on the specific kinds of understanding needed for those subjects.

For example, anchor standard 3 calls for students to: "Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text."

That's broken out for history and social studies by expecting students to:

• "Identify key steps in a text’s description of a process related to history/social studies (e.g., how a bill becomes law, how interest rates are raised or lowered)" in grades 6, 7, and 8.
• "Analyze in detail a series of events described in a text; determine whether earlier events caused later ones or simply preceded them" in grades 9 and 10.
• "Evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain" in grades 11 and 12.

For science and technical subjects, the grade-level versions ask students to:

• "Follow precisely a multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking measurements, or performing technical tasks" in grades 6, 7, and 8.
• "Follow precisely a complex multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking
• measurements, or performing technical tasks attending to special cases or exceptions defined in the text" in grades 9 and 10.
• "Follow precisely a complex multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking
• measurements, or performing technical tasks; analyze the specific results based on explanations in the text" in grades 11 and 12.

Overall, the reading standards push for students to work with complex texts at a much higher level than is common in most American schools now.  To reach that level of skill, they'll need ongoing instruction and ongoing practice across the middle and high school curriculum--and the common core gives a clear vision of how that can happen in a set of major academic subjects.