STAAR RLA: How to Teach Students to Switch Strategies Between Literary and Informational Texts
Your students can tell you about the main character's motivation and describe the problem in the story. Put a passage about ocean currents or the history of the steam engine in front of them and suddenly their reading strategy evaporates. They read it the same way they read fiction — looking for character, looking for plot — and miss the actual structure carrying the information.
The STAAR RLA test includes both literary and informational texts, and the skills needed to navigate each type are meaningfully different. Students who read everything the same way are leaving points behind on one text type or the other. Teaching them to recognize which kind of text they're reading — and shift gears accordingly — is one of the most productive moves you can make before the test.
I used to teach literary text for a week and informational text for a week, then move on. My students were fine with each type in isolation. But on the actual test, with both appearing in the same sitting, they'd lose track of which strategy they were supposed to use and default to fiction habits on everything. Teaching the switch — explicitly — is what changed that.
How STAAR Balances Literary and Informational Passages
The STAAR RLA test at each grade level includes a mix of literary texts (fiction, poetry, drama) and informational texts (expository, persuasive, procedural). The ratio shifts slightly across grades — informational text becomes more prominent in middle school and beyond — but both types appear at every tested grade level from 3rd through English II.
The question types also differ by text type. Literary passages generate questions about theme, character development, point of view, figurative language, and story structure. Informational passages generate questions about main idea, text structure, author's purpose, supporting details, and how evidence supports a claim.
A student who applies literary reading habits to an informational text is looking for the wrong things. They spend time looking for a "main character" in an article about climate change and miss the central argument entirely. That's not a comprehension problem — it's a text-type recognition problem, and it's fixable.
Action step: Pull three short passages — one clearly literary, one clearly informational, one that could go either way (like a first-person memoir or a creative nonfiction piece). Have students label each and justify their reasoning. The conversation reveals more about their reading habits than any quiz will.
Literary Text: What STAAR Questions Actually Focus On
For literary passages, STAAR consistently tests a handful of skills that students need to approach deliberately:
Theme: This is the hardest one. Students conflate theme with topic — "It's about friendship" instead of "Friendship requires sacrifice." Training them to state theme as a complete, transferable idea takes consistent practice. One wrong answer choice on STAAR is almost always the topic, not the theme, and students who don't know the difference pick it every time.
Character motivation and change: STAAR wants to know why characters do things and how they change across the text. Students often answer these with surface descriptions — "He was angry" — instead of inferences — "He was angry because he felt betrayed, and by the end he realized he had misunderstood the situation." The difference between a right and wrong answer is often the depth of the inference.
Figurative language in context: Simile, metaphor, and personification questions show up regularly, but the questions aren't "identify this device." They ask what the figurative language reveals about character or contributes to meaning. Students need to move past identifying the device to interpreting its function in the specific passage.
Action step: After reading any literary passage in class, always ask two questions: "Why did the author make this character do this?" and "What is the author trying to tell us that's bigger than this story?" These two questions train the habits STAAR tests directly.
Informational Text: Where Students Lose the Most Points
Informational text is where strong readers who aren't being strategic tend to lose the most ground. They read the passage, feel like they understood it, and then get to the questions and can't find where in the text to support their answers.
The most point-losing question types in informational passages:
Main idea vs. supporting detail: Students confuse the main idea of the entire passage with the main idea of a single paragraph. STAAR is very specific about what it's asking — "What is the central idea of this passage?" is different from "Which sentence best supports the author's claim?" Students who blur this distinction get these wrong consistently.
Text structure: Problem/solution, cause/effect, compare/contrast, sequence — knowing what structure the author used helps students predict where to look for information and how the ideas relate. Students who can't identify text structure spend more time rereading and lose stamina on long passages.
Author's purpose and point of view: For informational text, STAAR often asks why the author included specific information, what perspective they're presenting, and whether the evidence supports the claim. These are analytical questions that require students to think about the author's choices, not just absorb the content.
Action step: When practicing with informational passages, have students underline the main idea of each paragraph as they read. After finishing, ask: "If you had to choose one sentence from the whole passage as the central idea, which would it be?" This builds the skill of distinguishing central idea from supporting detail — the distinction that matters most on STAAR.
Teaching the Switch: A Classroom Routine That Works
The most efficient way to build text-type awareness is to make it explicit before every reading task. Before students read anything, they answer two questions:
- What type of text is this? (Literary or informational)
- What am I looking for? (Characters, theme, plot structure — or central idea, evidence, text structure)
This takes 30 seconds and it anchors students' reading to the right set of skills. Over time, they start doing it automatically — which is exactly what you want for test day, when you're not there to prompt them.
Paired passages deserve special attention here. STAAR includes paired passage sets at most grade levels, and they require students to synthesize across text types — sometimes comparing a literary and an informational text on the same topic. The skill of moving between the two within a single question set is one of the harder things to practice. It only comes with repeated exposure to paired sets, not just individual passages practiced in isolation.
Action step: For the next two weeks, label every reading you assign in class — out loud, every time: "This is a literary text — we're tracking theme and character" or "This is an informational text — we're tracking main idea and text structure." Make the text type explicit before every reading, not just during a designated lesson on it.
Question Stem Awareness: The Fastest Win in Reading Prep
Students who run out of time or freeze on reading questions often do so because they're re-reading the entire passage to answer each question. Teach them to use question stems as a targeting tool.
Before they answer any question, they should read the stem and identify: Is this a literary question or an informational question? That tells them which reading habits to activate. "What is the theme of this passage?" means they're looking for a universal idea. "What evidence best supports the author's claim?" means they're going back to the text to evaluate specific details against an argument.
This sounds basic, but it's one of the most common things struggling readers skip under test pressure. They read the passage, read the question, and immediately try to answer — without taking ten seconds to orient themselves to what the question is actually asking.
Action step: Practice with five questions only — have students read each question stem, label it as literary or informational, and write one phrase describing what they're looking for before they go back to the text. It slows them down just enough to get it right.
The Goal Is Automatic, Not Effortful
You're not trying to teach students a complicated decision tree they have to consciously run through on test day. You're building a habit. The student who walks into STAAR automatically thinking "OK, this is informational — I need the central argument and how the details support it" is a different reader than the one who treats every passage the same way.
That habit doesn't come from one lesson on text types. It comes from months of making the distinction explicit every single time they pick up a passage. Start now if you haven't already. The students who need this most are the ones who are reading well but losing points — and this is exactly where they're losing them.