Comparative Analysis of Lexical Features, Syntactic Complexity, and Cohesion in Fifth-Grade Science Content-Based Informational Texts

• In Event: Poster Session 3
  In Poster Session: Approaches to Fostering Reading Proficiency in Classroom Contexts

Abstract

This study compared fifth-grade science textbooks (Intervention) with texts from a High Stakes State Assessment (HSSA) and text exemplars from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative on three primary measures of text complexity – lexical features, syntactic complexity, and cohesion. The three most important general findings that emerged from statistical analyses were that 1) the Intervention, HSSA, and CCSS texts were comparable on all measures of lexical features, 2) the Intervention texts were more complex than the HSSA or CCSS texts on several, but not all measures of syntactic complexity and 3) the Intervention texts displayed significantly higher cohesion than the HSSA texts on several measures of cohesion and on all measures of cohesion for the CCSS texts.

Author

• Christopher D. Van Booven, New York University