Reading Time

When students go to an article page, a timer begins to count how long they spend on the article and its activities. Time in Article indicates how long a student spent actively working on an assignment at a specific reading level.

For an overview of average reading times for your students, teachers with paid subscriptions can go to their Reading Summary tab and look at the Avg. Time in Article column. From here, they can navigate into an individual student's Reading Summary page, where they can view their Reading Times for a specific class or assignment. 

Time in Article is based on a student's session on the page. A new session begins when a student opens an article. The timer will begin to record the time spent on the article. The timer will pause after 60 seconds of inactivity (no scrolling or clicking on the article page). When the student begins scrolling or clicking on the article page again, the timer will resume. A session will continue until the student completes one of the following actions:

  • Changes the reading level of the article

  • Navigates to a different page within Newsela

  • Closes the window

The time will only be sent to the teacher’s Binder when the session is over.

There may be a delay between a student's reading activity and the time being added to the Teacher Binder. If the time is still not showing up after 24 hours, please contact us so we can look into this. Let us know what student is affected and for which article. In addition, please give us your student's device details available here: https://www.whatsmybrowser.org/.