What is the Independent Reading Challenge?

Encourage independent reading with a student-led monthly challenge and teacher-driven reading challenges. Students can read articles across different engaging topics, and complete activities to earn reading badges.

How does it work?

Default monthly challenge: Every student automatically receives a Newsela authored monthly reading challenge with no teacher or admin configuration required.

Teacher-driven challenges: Teachers create challenges for their classes and set custom date ranges and number of articles read a goal (e.g., read X articles in Y period of time).

Targeted, filtered reading: Students express topic interests through filters and work through a right-sized, focused article set (exactly as many articles as needed to complete the target) rather than open-ended browsing.

Multi challenge tracking: Students can be enrolled in multiple independent challenges (e.g., class challenge + default monthly challenge). Single article reads do not double-count across multiple challenges.

The Teacher Experience

You can find the monthly reading challenge on both teachers' and students' homepage (click the Create a challenge button to access the Challenges page), as well as https://app.newsela.com/challenges/

The monthly challenge is 4 articles. For completion. Students need to get a passing grade (over 50%). Note a 50 would be a fail, so they would need a 51% or higher. Most quizzes have 4 questions, so the most common scores would be 25, 50, 75, and 100. Only 75 and 100 would count as passing.

On the Challenges page, teachers can access lists of all live and upcoming challenges, draft challenges, and past challenges.

To create a new teacher driven challenge, simply click on the Create a challenge button.

Proceed to:

Input a challenge name
Describe the reward your students can win by completing the challenge
Select the amount of articles each student will need to read and complete a quiz for. Note that students will need to score 3 out of the 4 questions correctly on each article to complete the challenge.
Select the class(es) this challenge will be assigned to
Set a start date and close date

You can select Save as draft, to return to the challenge creation at a later time, or finalize the assignment of the reading challenge by clicking Save challenge.

How can teachers see what content students are reading?

Teachers can visit the challenges page to view student progress. They can also visit their reports page and click on an individual students’ Reading Summary to view the content they are reading on Newsela.

The Student Experience

How do students complete the challenge?

Students must read the specified number of articles and complete the associated quiz with a passing grade (over 50%).

Note a 50 would be a fail, so they would need a 51% or higher. Most quizzes have 4 questions, so the most common scores would be 25, 50, 75, and 100. Only 75 and 100 would count as passing.

What do students get when they complete the challenge?

Students will earn a badge that will appear on their challenges dashboard.

General FAQs

Q: How many articles are included in each monthly challenge?

A: The monthly challenge includes four articles

Q: Do students have to score a certain percentage on the quiz to get credit?

A: Yes, students need to get a passing grade (over 50%). Note a 50 would be a fail, so they would need a 51% or higher. Most quizzes have 4 questions, so the most common scores would be 25, 50, 75, and 100. Only 75 and 100 would count as passing.

Q: What other activities are the students completing to get credit for the challenge?

A: None. We are only requiring quiz completion, but if you want additional items completed, you can always set that expectation or create a Newsela Assignment.

Q: Is there a way to turn off the read aloud for everyone participating in the challenge?

A: Not currently.

Q: If students do poorly on a quiz, do they have the option to redo the quiz and have it count toward their score for the challenge?

A: Students can redo the quiz until they pass.

Q: Is it possible for us as a school to set a passing percentage for the challenge?

A: No.

Q: How can we ensure articles have Power Words?

A: Power Words are not taken into account on independent reading challenges. It pulls relevant articles for students. Students have to take the quiz to get credit.

Q: My students collected tokens on the previous version of the reading challenge (prior to November, 2026) - do the token totals for each student re-start each month or do they keep accruing?

A: Tokens are no longer supported in Newsela. Instead, students will be granted badges for completion.

Q: How does the monthly challenge credit work with the teacher challenges? Do articles double count?

A: No, students who need to complete the total number of articles to get credit. If there is a monthly challenge of 4 articles and a teacher challenge of 4 articles, the student needs to read 8 articles to meet the challenge requirements.

Q: How do students get credit for reading when they have multiple challenges?

A: The best way to make sure articles are counting towards the correct challenge is to pick an article from each respective challenge page. However, if they search and find an article on their own, we will assign credit to the teacher challenges before we assign to the monthly challenge. If there are two teacher challenges in progress, the one ending first gets the credit.

Q: If students are only receiving credit for articles after quiz completion, are there other activities that will be available?

A: All activities with the exception of quiz and guided highlighting will be removed from the article page for students to keep them focused on what they need to complete for credit. If they find an article independent of a challenge (via search), they will continue to see all student facing activities.

Q: Can teachers drill into a particular student and see articles read as part of the challenge?

A: Not within the challenge itself, but a teacher can go into their reports page and click on any of their student names to see what they've been reading. This will be a combination of assigned articles and challenge articles.

Q: I see my students have a list of topics to choose from. Are topics based on grade levels?

A: No, all topics show for all grades, but content IS filtered based on elementary filters or additional content restrictions. If a student shouldn’t see content, they won’t.

Q: As a teacher, can I curate the list of articles my students choose from to customize the challenge further?

A: No, in the spirit of independent reading, this is about student choice. For a curated set of assignments, we recommend using our text-set assignment flow.