By Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/void.html

Filling the Great Void
Why We Should Bring Nonfiction into the Early-Grade Classroom

Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts

Data from several different sources converge on the point that informational text is scarce in primary-grade classrooms. One such source of data is the analyses of the text genres represented in basal reading series. The proportions we found reported in studies within the last two decades ranged
from a high of 33.8 percent factual articles in eight basal reading series for grade 2 (Schmidt, Caul, Byers, & Buchman, 1984) to a low of 12 percent nonfiction in five basal reading series for grade 1 (Hoffman et al., 1994).
In the most recent analysis of which we are aware, Moss and Newton (1998) examined six grade-2 basal reading series, copyright 1995 to 1997. They found a mean of 16 percent of selections that could be classified as informational literature.