Dive Brief:

• This year's "What Kids Are Reading" analysis of 9.8 million students and 334 million of the books showed a general decline in overall literacy, based on three Common Core-aligned factors.
• EdSurge reports that 66% of students "who read 15 or more minutes reading per day met (Common Core) standards vs only 39% of those who spent less than 15 minutes reading every day."
• Students' nonfiction selections were "largely sensational" and reported to be below their grade levels; one solution presented by the report's author, Renaissance Learning, is to assign more nonfiction.  

Dive Insight:

The comprehensive study looked at three factors aligned with Common Core standards in order to gauge how well American students are doing when it comes to reading: How much time they spent reading every day, how much nonfiction they consumed, and how they interacted with "complex" texts.

The report's findings support similarly dismal findings from the Nation's Report Card released last month, which showed 36% of fourth graders, 34% of eighth graders, and just 38% of high school seniors in the U.S. tested at or above proficiency level in reading. Worse, 50% of minority and low-income students fail to meet basic reading scores.