Text Complexity Key to Student Postsecondary Success

1. Adapted from the work of Susan Pimentel November 3, 2010 Text ComplexityKey to Student Postsecondary Success

2. Substantial, Durable Deficits inLater Reading Performance NAEP ResultsConfirmed by Other Measures • Early reading (4th grade) has improved somewhat. 1. ACT College Readiness • Reading stagnant at Grades 8 and 12 for 40 years! • Fewer than 40% of high school seniors can read and respond to questions from “complicated literary and informational passages. . .and extend and restructure ideas in specialized and complex texts.”

3. The Crisis of Complexity • Complexity of texts students are expected to handle K-12 has eroded: • High school textbooks have declined in all subject areas over several decades. • Average length of sentences in K-8 textbooks have declined from 20 to 14 words. • Vocabulary demands have declined, e.g., 8th grade textbooks equivalent to former 5th grade texts; 12th grade anthologies equal to former 7th grade. • Complexity of college and careers texts have remained steady or increased: • Lexile scores of college textbooks have not decreased in any block of time since 1962 and in fact have increased. • Vocabulary difficulty of newspapers has remained stable. • Word difficulty of scientific journals and magazines 1930–1990 has increased since 1930.

4. Result • Huge gap between end of high school and college reading demands equal to 350L (Lexile) or the Lexile difference between 4th grade and 8th grade NAEP texts! How much should we worry about this gap?

5. ACT Study • Purpose: Determine what distinguished the reading performance of students likely to succeed in college and not. • Process: • Set benchmark score on the reading test shown to be predictive of success in college (“21”) . • Looked at results from a half million students. • Divided texts into three levels of complexity: uncomplicated, more challenging, and complex.

6. Recap of ACT Findings • Question type (main idea, word meanings, details) is NOT the chief differentiator between students scoring above and below the benchmark. • Question level (higher order vs. lower order; literal vs. inferential) is NOT the chief differentiator between students either. • What students could read, in terms of its complexity--rather than what they could do with what they read—is greatest predictor of success.

7. Too Few Students Reading atToo Low a Level • Only half of high school graduates are meeting the benchmark. • Deficiencies are not equal opportunity. . .

8. The fortunate ones are kids. . . • Who have had lots of books available to them at home and whose caretakers read to them in their early years with great regularity. • Who have had teachers that augmented textbooks with adequately complex reading. • Who themselves have become eager and independent readers because they learned how to read well in their first years of their schooling.

9. The unfortunate ones are. . . • Those who are isolated from texts before arriving at the schoolhouse door. • Struggling readers who are never given the opportunity to grapple with adequately complex texts. • Kids thought not to be able to “handle” the regular curriculum so materials are pitched at a much lower level. • English learners who are provided adapted texts that are often so greatly simplified they provide little exposure to the content and the forms/structures of the language they should be learning.

12. What’s wrong with the simplifiedtext approach? • Simplified usually means limited, restricted, and thin in meaning. • Academic vocabulary can only be learned from complex texts––by noticing how it works in texts, engaging with, thinking about, and discussing their more complex meanings with others. • Mature language skills needed for success in school and life can only be gained by working with demanding materials. • No evidence that struggling readers—especially at middle and high school--catch up by gradually increasing the complexity of simpler texts. . .

13. Measures of Text Complexity • Quantitative measures or readability formulas stand as proxies for semantic and syntactic complexity: • Word length; word frequency/familiarity • Sentence length and text length • Qualitative measures complement and sometimes correct quantitative measures: • Purpose • Language conventionality and clarity • Text Structures • Knowledge demands

14. Measures of Text Complexity,cont’d. • Quantitative and qualitative measures are at once useful and imperfect. • Quantitative measures are less valid for certain kinds of texts: • Poetry • k-1 texts • Complex narrative fiction • Qualitative measures are on a continuum (not grade/band specific) and most useful working in conjunction with quantitative measures.

15. Other Text ComplexityConsiderations • Percent of expository reading assigned • Degree of independence required when reading • Vocabulary!

16. Need to Foster Independent Reading • Students are given considerable scaffolding to comprehend texts in k-12. • General movement should be toward decreasing scaffolding and increasing independence because that is what will be demanded in college and the workplace (and on new tests).

17. Need to Systematically Focus on Vocabulary • Vocabulary is empirically connected to reading comprehension. • Successful instruction incorporates and integrates morphology, phonology, etymology, orthography, and syntax as well as meanings. • Instruction needs to be developed from text (frequency of rare words in even educated adult conversation is 17.3 per 1000 words) • Instruction needs to include heavy dose of informational text as it contains more rare words than narratives. • Instruction needs to teach how meanings of words vary with context (e.g., Texas was admitted to the union, he admitted his errors, admission was too expensive).

18. Special Focus on General Academic Vocabulary • Words that are likely to appear frequently in a wide variety of texts/disciplines (utility & importance) • Words that are necessary for understanding a text and allow for rich representations (instructional potential) • Words that relate to other words and offer students more precise ways of referring to ideas they already know about (conceptual understanding)

19. Sequenced Vocabulary Instruction • First, contextualize the word for its use in the story that you are reading. • “She’s just too much of a distraction and I’ve been getting calls from the other parents. They’re afraid those stripes may be contagious.” • Next, ask the children to repeat the word so that they can create a phonological representation of the word. • “Say contagious with me.” (clap it out) • Next, explain the student friendly meaning of the word. • “Contagious means an illness that can spread to other people.” • Provide examples in contexts other than the one used in the story. • “The surgeon scrubbed his hands to prevent the spread of contagious germs.” • Have students interact with the word… • “Could you be contagious if you went to work with strep throat?

20. Research Underway • To develop a tool that will gauge the complexity of texts in a number of dimensions including but not limited to readability measures. • To work with publishers on how to best use this tool in selecting texts as well as in developing materials and programs for states adopting the CCSS. • To develop a pool of annotated texts that exemplify and benchmark the process of evaluating complexity to help educators develop/select the best materials and methods for students. • To work with assessment developers so their assessments are based on these same principles.

21. What Schools Can Do Now • Take Complexity Inventory of what students are reading in each grade and make adjustments. • Adjust balances of texts so students are exposed to: • More expository texts k-12 in and out of English classes • More traditional narratives and poetry • As much as possible use on grade/band level text for instruction (with supports). • Ask students to stretch to read more complex texts— especially short texts--beyond their reading level (with supports).

22. What Schools Can Do Now,cont’d. • Teach students to read strategically. . .to slow down to understand key points and to re-read passages. • Attend systematically to building general academic vocabulary across-the-board. • Make word learning part of the school culture! • Give frequent formative assessments that present students with standards based tasks and provide absolutely no direct teacher support (writing to sources).

23. Teaching versus Testing Comprehension Determining Reading Comprehension Teaching To Develop Deep Text Understanding vs Process-Oriented Asking Questions Modeling Testing Grading Guided Practice with Feedback Evaluating Student Use with Feedback (Adapted by Dr. Lois Huffman from Richardson & Morgan, 2000)