With many New Jersey students having already taken the PARCC Assessment last year, Becton teachers are incorporating a new online learning tool into their lesson plans this year called Newsela. The goal of Newsela is to help students improve reading comprehension and in turn, prepare for the PARCC.

Newsela provides daily news articles at many different reading levels, allowing grades K-12 free access to their site.

Sophomore Donna Carella said, “I think Newsela is great because of the fact that so many grades can use it and because almost all of them take the PARCC.”

Each article on the site contains five different levels of text complexity depending on grade level. These levels, called Lexile bands, determine what the text should look like. The Lexile Framework for Reading states that “The Lexile Framework is a scientific way to match readers with text using the same scale . . . Lexile® measures connect learners of all ages with resources at the right level of challenge. Lexile measures provide a clear way to monitor progress toward college and career readiness.”

The Lexile measure uses numbers ranging between 0 to 2,000 to help categorize text based on its complexity. The Lexile bands predict an average high school student’s Lexile range to be between 1080L and 1355L. Newsela’s five levels are 570L, 840L, 1040L, 1200L, and a max level.

Newsela’s articles range in many subjects and topics such as War & Peace, Law, Science, Health, Art, Sports, etc. The site showcases current events involving a wide variety of topics and subjects. One of the main reasons Newsela is used as PARCC practice is because a short quiz is provided along with each article to test the reader’s understanding of the story, similar to how the PARCC test incorporates text, which the students must analyze and interpret to answer questions.

Becton Department Chairperson and English Teacher Mrs. Cannarozzi stated, “You can actually choose a subject, and it will give you a cluster of articles on that particular subject.” She added, “I love the fact that all the information is in one place and related to the PARCC.” Mrs. Cannarozzi recommends other staff members to use Newsela as a study tool because she enjoys it herself.

English Teacher Mrs. Scalera said, “I thinks it’s alright. Some of the nonfiction articles are interesting.”

Not only are English teachers using Newsela in their classrooms though. History Teacher Mr. Bononno noted that seeing his daughter use Newsela in her school for so many years influenced him to use it in his class environment, and Mr. Bononno said that he even tried to incorporate it into Becton’s school curriculum three years ago.

“It’s a way for me to introduce current events and practice for the PARCC. You can ‘kill two birds with one stone’ . . . It’s a great tool,” he said.