Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards (hereafter CCSS) contains a review of the research stressing the importance of being able to read complex text for success in college and career. The research shows that while the complexity of reading demands for college, career, and citizenship have held steady or risen over the past half century,…

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual…

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…

What is meant by text complexity is a measurement of how challenging a particular text is to read. There are a myriad of different ways of explaining what makes text challenging to read, from the sophistication of the vocabulary employed to the length of its sentences to even measurements of how the text as a whole coheres. Research shows that no…

Background: Readability tests are indicators that measure how easy a document can be read and understood. Simple, but very often ignored, readability statistics cannot only provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents but also can increase an evaluator's credibility. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Acknowledging widely recognized shortcomings of readability formulas, the authors propose a technique for analyzing syntactic complexity. (RB)

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

Reviews research findings about community college students' reading skill levels; the discrepancy between reading levels and the difficulty of college-level reading materials; reading program characteristics and effectiveness; textbook readibility formulas; and other methods of evaluating textbooks. Offers recommendations for reducing the…