What is Newsela?
Newsela takes authentic, real world content from trusted sources and makes it instruction ready for ELA, social studies, and science classrooms. Texts are published at five reading levels, so content can be both challenging to and supportive of every learner. Today, more than 3.3 million teachers and 40 million students have registered with Newsela for content that’s accessible to everyone, aligned to standards, and attached to activities and reporting that provide visibility into what students are learning and how teachers are leveraging the content in instruction. With more than 15,000 texts and multiple new texts published daily across 20+ genres, Newsela has the content to help educators fill the gaps in their core materials. Teachers love that Newsela helps them create more engaging lessons that meet students where they are, and administrators love having the assurance that every content choice teachers make is vetted, aligned to standards, and contributing to learning.
Does Newsela work?
Yes, Newsela works. Newsela products are rooted in research and learning science, and proven to drive learning outcomes by a growing number of efficacy studies conducted by Newsela and third party evaluators. Newsela’s efficacy has been proven via well-designed and well-implemented quasi-experimental research meeting ESSA standards for “Tier 2 - Moderate” research. Visit our research page for more information.
How do you pronounce Newsela?
This is a passionately debated topic! While we know many like to think of us as “News-ELA” (it started as a news platform for ELA teachers, after all!), the accurate pronunciation is actually one word: New-sel-a. Like umbrella or mozzarella.
How do I access content on Newsela?
Newsela has a range of premium products to support ELA, social studies, and science classrooms. You can get a taste of Newsela’s premium content and features by signing up for a free Newsela Lite account. Click here to get started.
What grades/subjects does Newsela support?
Newsela provides products that engage, support, and grow every learner in grades 3-12 across ELA, social studies, science, math, world languages, and general elementary.
Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, The Newsela SEL Collection, and Newsela Essentials provide engaging, differentiated content for those subjects. All content is aligned to state standards and curated to help teachers create engaging lessons. Formative by Newsela supports daily instruction and assessment for these grade levels and subject areas, plus math and world languages.
Can I use Formative and other Newsela products together?
Yes. Newsela products work better together! You can add customizable assessment activities to enhance any Newsela texts through our integration with Formative – the leading real-time instruction and assessment platform.
Does Newsela support social & emotional learning?
The Newsela SEL Collection is an add-on that is sold separately and includes activities and resources for social-emotional learning aligned to the CASEL competencies. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers can all use this collection as part of their school or district’s social-emotional learning curriculum. This collection can be purchased as an add-on to one of Newsela’s subject products. Click here to learn more
Is Newsela a good option for virtual learning / remote teaching
Newsela’s flexible platform can support any of your teachers’ lessons, whether they are teaching virtually, in-person, or have a hybrid learning model. And while we know that teaching remotely can have its challenges, Newsela has a variety of distance learning resources that meet the needs of all virtual learners. To learn more, visit Distance Learning with Newsela.
Does Newsela support assessments?
Yes! Newsela offers Formative, which supports a range of assessment needs, from in-class checks for understanding to district-level assessments. In addition, Newsela’s subject products come with embedded reading comprehension quizzes, writing prompts, and the ability to add customizable assessments through Formative.
Is Newsela free?
Newsela Lite is a free version of our premium products and a great introduction to everything Newsela has to offer, including: a new, timely leveled article each week, standards alignment, skill-building activities and access to the Binder to review student work. Click here to learn more and create a free account.
Can teachers buy Newsela premium products to use in their classrooms?
Only schools and districts can purchase Newsela’s premium products (Newsela Essentials, Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, and Formative). Get in touch with our team for more information.
How much does Newsela cost?
For paid school and district licenses, pricing varies based on the number of students served and the products purchased. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.