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The Common Core State Standards have placed more emphasis on the close reading of all texts, and have made a point of increasing the use of nonfiction in secondary English classrooms. In this article, the author describes an approach for implementing close reading of literary nonfiction. The approach comes from a small-scale classroom-based research study that revealed statistically significant gains on the subtest measuring analysis of literature. After defining close reading and discussing how and why instructional methods differ, based on elements of analysis within fiction and nonfiction, the author describes the close reading approach using student samples. The approach described in detail is a three-column journal used for guiding students in the close reading of literary nonfiction.

This article describes a dual-case study that was conducted to examine the effects of The Tools Approach on kindergarten students' use of and interest in informational text. Children in one teacher's kindergarten classroom during two subsequent years participated in a writing intervention which included learning about text features, conducting group research, and conducting individual research. During both cases, data were collected during child, parent, and teacher interviews. The results of this study showed that children participating in The Tools Approach strategy increased their abilities to identify and use text features to gather and disseminate information. Children also demonstrated increased interest in reading and writing informational text as a result of their participation in the study.

A selection of academic libraries was studied to examine ownership of best-sellers from 1940 to 1990. The trend is to keep a higher percentage of older best-sellers in fiction than newer ones. Nonfiction appears to be more sporadic but still follows this trend. Findings indicate new collection development policies may be needed to protect important works of fiction and nonfiction. (AEF)