For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Large language models (LLMs) offer an opportunity to make large-scale changes to educational content that would otherwise be too costly to implement. The work here highlights how LLMs (in particular GPT-4) can be prompted to revise educational math content ready for large scale deployment in real-world learning environments. We tested the ability…

We compared high school students' performance in a traditional comprehension assessment requiring them to identify key information and draw inferences from single texts, and a scenario-based assessment (SBA) requiring them to integrate, evaluate and apply information across multiple sources. Both assessments focused on a non-academic topic.…

Background knowledge is a strong predictor of reading comprehension; yet little is known about how different types of background knowledge affect comprehension. The study investigated the impacts of both domain and topic-specific background knowledge on students' ability to comprehend and learn from science texts. High school students (n = 3650)…

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of self-explanation reading training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT training. The results showed that SERT benefited…