Lexical Difficulty and Diversity of First-Grade Reading Textbooks: Changes in the Last 50 Years

• In Event: 70.021 - Multiple Perspectives on the Complexity of First-Grade Texts Over the Past 50 Years

Abstract

PERSPECTIVES: The majority of states including the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the most recent educational reform movement in the United States. One of the main arguments supporting the rapid adoption of the CCSS is an apparent recent decline in the complexity of school reading texts. Appendix A of the CCSS for English Language Arts cites several studies (Chall, Conard, & Harris, 1977; Hayes, Wolfer, and Wolfe, 1996) documenting a “precipitous decline” (NGA/CCSSO, 2010, p.3) in the complexity of reading texts over the last century. This paper expands upon previous research that evaluates the complexity of school reading textbooks over the past century (Authors, 2013). These findings showed a distinctly different pattern of historical shifts than the simple declines reported by the CCSS authors. Put simply, findings offer compelling evidence that the complexity of readers, at the third- and sixth-grade levels, has either increased or remained consistent over the past three-quarters of a century.

PURPOSES: The purpose of this paper is to apply similar analytic measures to first-grade texts to examine the historical shifts in complexity. Due to the differing nature of first-grade materials, we selected similar measures that allow for rough comparability with our previous analyses (Authors, 2013; Authors, 20014). We use a variety of measures to understand changes in the lexical difficulty, lexical diversity, readability and mean sentence length over the course of the past century. Lexical difficulty measures the degree of sophistication (familiarity) of the words in a text. Lexical diversity, on the other hand, measures the range of unique words in a text. What constitutes familiar or difficult words will vary from reader to reader; however, previous studies have reported experimental evidence that word frequency significantly affects reading comprehension (Marks, 1974; McGregor, 1989).

METHODS: The following measures are included in the analyses:
● Word Frequency Band (WFB) measures lexical difficulty--WFB uses a historical word list from Google books to determine familiarity of each word in the text.
● Corrected Type Token Ratio (CTTR) measures lexical diversity by creating a ratio of the number of unique words to the number of total words in a text.
● Spache (1952), a formula commonly used to measure readability of early reading materials, uses the average sentence length and the number of unique unfamiliar words based on the Spache Revised Word List (1974)
● The mean length of sentences (MLS).

RESULTS: Preliminary analyses (Table 1 and Figure 1) reveal that all measures demonstrate a pattern of increase between 1960 and 2010, but only CTTR (lexical diversity) shows a steady increase. Most measures demonstrate a peak in the 1990s. For all measures, the most recent texts (the 2000s and 2010s) are higher than those found in the 1960s.

SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE: We will discuss the similarities and differences between the findings for our previous study of third- and sixth-grade materials and our current analysis of first-grade textbooks over the past fifty years. We will also address potential implications for practitioners and policy makers.

Authors

• David A. Gamson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Sarah Anne Eckert, Agnes Irwin School

• Xiaofei Lu, The Pennsylvania State University