Briana Mendez-Padilla writes: “To encourage students to read novels, teachers can employ strategies such as allowing students to choose their books, encouraging them to read ones outside their comfort zone, and providing supplemental reading materials. The reading of novels is being sacrificed for short passage reading because students are more likely to encounter these texts in standardized tests, said Alex Corbitt, assistant professor of literacy at the State University of New York at Cortland. Corbitt encourages teachers to create book clubs that are thematically organized but with three or four different novel options at varying reading levels for students to choose from.”