Common Core: Challenges and opportunities to incorporate nonfiction into K-12 curriculum

The Common Core standards recommend an integration of nonfiction literature into the K-12 curriculum. Anecdotal evidence, however, indicates that students are not receptive to reading nonfiction or informational material. Therefore, the first objective of this project is to examine the extent to which K-12 students, divided across gender, grade level, and school type prefer reading fiction over nonfiction literature. The project then takes a step further in investigating whether students show an overwhelming (dis)like for specific fiction and nonfiction subgenres. Using a survey-based approach to answer these questions, the project discovered the following trends: (i) male and lower elementary students prefer nonfiction compared to female, middle school, and high school students; (ii) nonfiction subgenres can be clustered into groups based on students' interests, and (iii) very weak penchant is seen for physical sciences. Taken together, these trends identify challenges and opportunities to integrate nonfiction materials into the K-12 curriculum.