Analyzing Informational Texts Worksheets

About This Collection of Worksheets

This collection helps 7th graders move beyond simply recalling facts from an informational passage. Students examine how authors organize technical explanations, develop central ideas, support arguments, communicate a purpose, and guide readers through unfamiliar subjects. Topics such as deep-sea robots, artificial intelligence, microplastics, earthquake-resistant buildings, Mars simulations, and 3D-printed housing keep the reading fresh while giving students meaningful practice with nonfiction.

The worksheets cover a broad range of informational reading skills without making every activity feel the same. Students may trace the sequence of a scientific mission, distinguish facts from interpretations, write an objective summary, uncover loaded language, judge an author’s rebuttal, make an inference, or combine ideas from two related sources. Each page gives students a clear reason to return to the passage, locate supporting details, and explain how the text led them to an answer.

Teachers can use these printable pages during close-reading lessons, science and technology units, intervention groups, homework, test preparation, or independent practice. The collection supports major Common Core expectations for citing textual evidence, identifying central ideas, understanding vocabulary in context, analyzing text structure, determining purpose and tone, evaluating arguments, and comparing multiple sources. Because the topics and tasks vary from page to page, students receive repeated skill practice without the collection becoming predictable or overly templated.

Paul’s Teacher Tip

Before students answer any questions, ask them to write a five- to eight-word note beside each paragraph explaining its job. One paragraph might introduce a problem, another may define a term, and another may provide evidence or describe a solution. These brief notes help students see the author’s plan instead of viewing the passage as one large block of facts. When students give a written answer, have them point to the sentence or paragraph that supports it before they begin writing. This routine encourages stronger text evidence and reduces answers based only on memory or personal opinion.

Worksheet Collection Skill Spotlights

AI Purpose

What Kids Do: Students read a clear introduction to artificial intelligence and decide why the author created the article. They examine definitions, examples, explanations, tone, word choice, and intended audience to determine whether the writer is mainly informing, entertaining, persuading, or sharing a personal viewpoint.

Target Skill: Readers analyze how an author’s purpose is communicated through the type of information included and the way it is presented. This supports Common Core work with purpose, audience, tone, word choice, and the connection between an author’s goal and the structure of an informational text.

Counterclaim Review

What Kids Do: Students examine an argument about limiting nightly homework to one hour. They identify the author’s claim, locate the opposing position, and study the response that follows before deciding whether the rebuttal directly and fairly answers concerns about practice, learning, and academic progress.

Target Skill: This activity develops the ability to trace an argument across claims, counterclaims, reasons, and rebuttals. Students practice evaluating whether an author recognizes another viewpoint and answers it with relevant evidence and sound reasoning rather than merely repeating the original position.

Cycling Strategies

What Kids Do: Students read about several ways cities can make cycling safer and more practical, including protected lanes, connected routes, bicycle signals, parking areas, and sharing programs. They identify the main goal and explain how individual city-planning choices help solve specific transportation problems.

Target Skill: Learners analyze how major supporting details develop and clarify a central idea throughout an informational article. The activity supports Common Core expectations for determining a text’s main idea, distinguishing major strategies from minor facts, and explaining relationships among connected concepts.

Drone Regulation

What Kids Do: Students investigate an argument about regulating personal drones because of aviation safety, privacy, and operator training concerns. They identify the author’s position, sort evidence by the problem it addresses, and explain why the passage supports reasonable rules instead of calling for a complete ban.

Target Skill: Students trace how claims, reasons, evidence, and opposing views work together within an informational argument. This Common Core-aligned task asks readers to judge whether each fact is relevant, whether the reasoning is logical, and whether the proposed solution matches the concerns described.

Habit Science

What Kids Do: Students explore how habits form through cues, routines, and rewards while sorting statements into facts and interpretations. They must decide which ideas can be directly checked against research in the passage and which statements explain what someone believes those findings may mean.

Target Skill: This page strengthens careful use of textual evidence and helps students separate documented information from conclusions drawn from that information. It supports Common Core analysis of evidence, claims, and interpretation while teaching students that a reasonable explanation is not automatically a proven fact.

Housing Futures

What Kids Do: Students read about 3D-printed homes and make logical inferences about affordability, labor, construction speed, materials, emergency housing, and future use. For every conclusion, they must select information from the passage and explain the reasoning that connects those details to the inference.

Target Skill: Readers practice combining multiple pieces of textual evidence to reach conclusions the author does not state word for word. The activity supports Common Core expectations for inference, evidence citation, and logical explanation while discouraging unsupported guesses or answers based on outside knowledge.

Martian Tone

What Kids Do: Students enter the daily world of a Mars simulation habitat and study language describing tight spaces, careful schedules, delayed communication, demanding work, teamwork, and discovery. They choose the tone that best fits the complete article and support that choice with exact words or sentences.

Target Skill: This activity develops the ability to determine an author’s attitude by considering patterns in descriptive language across an entire text. Students work with connotation, tone, purpose, and textual evidence rather than choosing a feeling based only on the unusual or exciting subject.

Quake Summary

What Kids Do: Students read a technical explanation of base isolation, cross-bracing, shear walls, and flexible building materials. They then write a brief objective summary that combines related engineering details, communicates the central idea, and leaves out personal reactions, repeated examples, and minor information.

Target Skill: Learners determine a central idea and select only the most important details needed to explain it accurately. This Common Core-aligned practice strengthens objective summarizing, information grouping, paraphrasing, and the ability to shorten a complex passage without changing its meaning.

Robot Exploration

What Kids Do: Students follow the journey of a deep-sea robot from preparation aboard a research ship to its work on the ocean floor. They study the machine’s design, controls, equipment, testing, and scientific purpose while tracing the sequence of actions during an underwater mission.

Target Skill: Students analyze how description and sequence work together to explain a complicated scientific process. The worksheet supports Common Core study of informational text structure by asking readers to notice time-order clues and explain how organized details make technical ideas easier to follow.

Scooter Bias

What Kids Do: Students compare favorable and unfavorable language in an article about electric scooters in public spaces. They locate phrases that make scooters appear convenient, affordable, disruptive, or unsafe and explain how those choices can influence the reader’s impression of the issue.

Target Skill: Readers analyze loaded language, connotation, tone, perspective, and balance within informational writing. This activity supports Common Core standards for word choice and author viewpoint while helping students distinguish emotionally slanted wording from neutral facts and straightforward descriptions.

Vocabulary Mapping

What Kids Do: Students learn about microplastics while using nearby definitions, examples, and explanations to determine the meanings of technical words such as biodegradable, accumulation, filtration, and distribution. They restate each meaning in everyday language and check whether it fits naturally in the original sentence.

Target Skill: This worksheet strengthens the ability to determine the meaning of academic and scientific vocabulary through context. Students practice identifying definition clues, examples, word relationships, and explanatory details instead of depending only on a dictionary or guessing from one part of a word.

Water Solutions

What Kids Do: Students read two related texts about water scarcity, with one explaining desalination and the other focusing on conservation. They compare the strengths, costs, drawbacks, and possible uses of both approaches before writing responses that combine evidence from the two sources.

Target Skill: Learners synthesize information by connecting ideas across separate informational texts on the same subject. The activity supports Common Core expectations for comparing authors’ presentations, identifying agreements and differences, and constructing a fuller understanding with evidence drawn from both sources.