Considering Visual Text Complexity: A Guide for Teachers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Text Complexity: Primary Teachers’ Views
Literacy Research and Instruction, 2014
The research question was, “What text characteristics do primary teachers think are most important for early grades text complexity?” Teachers from across the United States accomplished a two-part task. First, to stimulate teachers’ thinking about important text characteristics, primary teachers completed an online paired-text comparison task. While doing the task, teachers were asked to decide which texts in pairs were more complex, and they were also asked to think about which text characteristics mattered most for their decisions. Next, teachers completed a questionnaire, with primary focus on the text characteristics teachers thought mattered most for early grades text complexity. The teachers emphasized word decodability, word frequency, pictures, and word meanings, and they also referenced other characteristics. Their outlook has implications for implementation of the Common Core Standard on text complexity for young children learning to read.
Important Text Characteristics for Early-Grades Text Complexity
The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three-hundred-fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified at four linguistic levels, and multiple computerized operationalizations were created for each of the 22 text characteristics. A researcher-devised text-complexity outcome measure was based on: teacher judgment of text complexity in the 350 texts; and text complexity as gauged from student responses using a maze task for a subset of the 350 texts. Analyses were conducted using a logical analytical progression typically used in machine-learning research. Random forest regression was the primary statistical modeling technique. Nine text characteristics were most important for early-grades text complexity including word structure (decoding demand and number of syllables in words), word meaning (age of acquisition, abstractness, and word rareness), and sentence and discourse-level characteristics (intersentential complexity, phrase diversity, text density/information load, and non-compressibility). Notably, interplay among text characteristics was important to explanation of text complexity, particularly for subsets of texts.
Examining text complexity in the early grades
Phi Delta Kappan, 2016
The Common Core raises the stature of texts to new heights, creating a hubbub. The fuss is especially messy at the early grades, where children are expected to read more complex texts than in the past. But early-grades teachers have been given little actionable guidance about text complexity. The authors recently examined early-grades texts to discover what makes them complex and now report that there is a lot that can help teachers, specifically, young children’s texts are special, a handful of text characteristics can signal text-complexity level, sometimes the interplay of text characteristics modulates text-complexity level, and knowing why a text is complex can facilitate text selection.
A Content Analysis of Visuals in Elementary School Textbooks
The Elementary School Journal, 2018
Although visual complexity is increasing and graphics are essential to support readers' comprehension of disciplinary texts, visual literacy receives scant attention. Research suggests that effectively instructing students to interpret discipline-specific graphics would yield better comprehension. However, before this line of inquiry can be enacted, we must determine the characteristics of graphics in contemporary content textbooks. Therefore, this content analysis evaluated graphics within third-and fifth-grade science and social studies textbooks. We coded 3,844 graphics by type and function and compared findings between disciplines using chi-square and post hoc comparison tests. Overall, graphics were coded into 9 major types (photographs being most frequent) and 54 subtypes, indicating a diversity of graphics. When comparing disciplines, science textbooks contained more diagrams and photographs, and graphics more often functioned representationally. Social studies presented both a wider variety of graphics and more interpretationally challenging graphics. Implications for disciplinary literacy and instruction are discussed.
Text Complexity and the Common Core
The Utah Journal of Literacy, 2013
An electronic interview with The Utah Journal of Literacy that also includes quotations from Hiebert's writings. Hiebert discusses her concerns regarding text complexity and teachers' identification and selection of texts for their students that fall within the Lexile bands identified by the Common Core recommendations. Hiebert notes that readability formulas can be a starting point, but by themselves do not adequately measure a text's complexity which can be affected by the knowledge demands of the content and the text's structure. Hiebert provides recommendations for teachers on how to identify texts that appropriately illustrate the progression and growth that is expected of students at particular grade levels. Hiebert also discusses the need for teachers to help students develop their reading stamina, vocabulary, and engagement with texts.
Supporting Students' Movement Up the Staircase of Text Complexity
The Reading Teacher, 2013
Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students’ capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process—the Text Complexity Multi‐Index (TCMI)—that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in increasing capacity with complex text. The TCMI addresses the three prongs of the text complexity triad identified by the CCSS: quantitative, qualitative, and reader‐task. As teachers apply steps of the TCMI process, they become increasingly knowledgeable about the features of texts that can create challenges for students and those that provide the content of lessons that support students in reading increasingly more complex texts across their school careers.
Reading Psychology, 2023
This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study, we report findings from the Text Complexity Task, a verbal protocol task administered to 31 preservice teachers. Findings show that when evaluating text complexity, preservice teachers noted word and text-level features, but attended less to phonemic patterns, multisyllable words, and sentence-level features. Additionally, participants differed in their arguments about how some text features (e.g., unknown vocabulary, rhyming patterns) influence text difficulty. Preservice teachers also differed in their views of how a reader’s prior knowledge influences text difficulty, vocabulary knowledge, and word solving. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher educators interested in improving preservice teachers’ text selection for reading instruction.
Understanding the New Demands for Text Complexity in American Secondary Schools
Fundamentals of Literacy Instruction and Assessment, 7-12., 2014
The challenges of identifying and addressing the features that contribute to text difficulty have become more pressing as schools begin to use the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to shape their instruction. Indeed, the major focus of the CCSS English Language Arts (ELA) standards is that, over their school careers, students encounter and become more proficient at reading increasingly complex text. This chapter will explore text complexity and the rationale for the CCSS focus on text complexity. Three overall approaches for determining text complexity are presented.
Text Complexity and the Early Grades: The Fuss and How Recent Research Can Help
Phi Delta Kappan
The Common Core raises the stature of texts to new heights, creating a hubbub. The fuss is especially messy at the early-grades, where children are expected to read more complex texts than in the past. But early-grades teachers have been given little actionable guidance about text complexity. We recently examined early-grades texts to discover what makes them complex. We learned a lot that can help teachers-young children's texts are special, a handful of text characteristics can signal text-complexity level, sometimes the interplay of text characteristics modulates text-complexity level, and knowing why a text is complex can facilitate text selection.