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An Analysis of the Features of Words That Influence Vocabulary Difficulty
July 11, 2022
The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students’ performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge.
Does Text Complexity Matter in the Elementary Grades? A Research Synthesis of Text Difficulty and Elementary Students’ Reading Fluency and Comprehension
July 11, 2022
This is the accepted (not copy-edited) manuscript of an article forthcoming in Educational Psychology Review. Quotations should be lifted only from the published version. Prompted by the advent of new standards for increased text complexity in elementary classrooms in the United States, the current integrative review investigates relationships between the level of text difficulty and elementary students’ reading fluency and reading comprehension. After application of content and methodological criteria, a total of 26 research studies were reviewed. Characteristics of the reviewed studies are reported including the different conceptualizations of text, reader, and task interactions. Regarding the relationships between text difficulty and reading fluency and comprehension, for students’ reading fluency, on average, increased text difficulty level was related to decreased reading fluency, with a small number of exceptions. For comprehension, on average, text difficulty level was negatively related to reading comprehension, although a few studies found no relationship. Text difficulty was widely conceptualized across studies and included characteristics particular to texts as well as relationships between readers and texts. Implications for theory, policy, curriculum, and instruction are discussed.
Investigating the Validity of Two Widely Used Quantitative Text Tools
July 11, 2022
In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria.
An Analysis of the Text Complexity of Leveled Passages in Four Popular Classroom Reading Assessments
July 11, 2022
This is the version of an article accepted at Educational Assessment on December 11, 2016. Please note that this is neither the copy-edited nor published version.This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1–6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade progression of average complexity among the four assessments. However, considerable cross-assessment variability was observed in terms of the size of increase in complexity from grade to grade, the overall range of complexity, and the within-grade text complexity. These cross-assessment differences were less pronounced with newer, multi-factor analytical tools. The four assessments also differed in the extent to which their passages met the text complexity guidelines of the Common Core State Standards. The authors discuss implications of the differences found among and within the classroom assessment systems, on one hand, and among the measures of text complexity, on the other.
Factors that Influence the Difficulty of Science Words
July 11, 2022
This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics—length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness—that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to explain variation in word knowledge and word learning.
What Differences in Narrative and Informational Texts Mean for the Learning and Instruction of Vocabulary
July 11, 2022
In this chapter, we examine the differences between the target vocabularies of an English/language arts (ELA) program that is dominated by narrative texts and a science program with informational texts.
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