Knowledge-Building Resources for Middle and High School

A high-leverage, evidence-based strategy to support students in accessing a complex text is to anchor that text in a conceptually coherent set of resources that build needed knowledge and vocabulary. This work is particularly critical for students not yet reading at grade level.

The resources on this page are designed to support educators developing their own knowledge-building text sets. For examples of these text sets paired with close reading lessons, click here.

The knowledge-building resources found here are based on the quad text set model developed by Comprehensive Reading Solutions and described in this article by Sarah Lupo and colleagues, “Building Background Knowledge Through Reading: Rethinking Text Sets.” In a quad text set model, three to five texts are selected that help students develop knowledge critical to the complex text at the center of the close-reading lesson. Each of these supplemental texts is paired with a lightweight text-dependent task to support students’ comprehension and knowledge-building work. Implementing these knowledge-building texts and tasks can be done in a variety of ways; they are lightweight enough to be done either during short portions of class or as homework.