Reading Demands and Text Comprehension in Third and Fourth Grades

• In Event: Text Comprehension: What We Know About the Dance Between Reader, Text, and Task in Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Students who advance in education need to be able to comprehend successively demanding texts (Fitzgerald et al., 2015). Students’ text comprehension improves most when the reading demands of learning material is aligned with their abilities (Allington, McCuiston, &Billen, 2015).
However, judging text demands, may be especially difficult in 3rd and 4th grades because, (1) reading skills and knowledge are developing rapidly and, (2) students make a shift from reading narrative to expository text genres (McNamara, Ozuru & Floyd, 2017).
Theoretical Framework
Text comprehension involves multiple components, including, efficient mastery of reading sub-processes (e.g., decoding words: Richter et al., 2012), the application of reading strategies, vocabulary, schemata, and general world knowledge (Kintsch, Patel & Ericsson, 1999).
Text features contribute to reading demands because they facilitate or inhibit the mastery of reading sub-processes or require a larger vocabulary, or different schemata. For instance, long words inhibit decoding processes.
Reading comprehension of 3rd graders may be more limited by lower-order reading processes (like decoding words) compared to 4th graders. For instance, decoding skill have an effect on reading comprehension across grades; however; the effect is smaller in higher grades (e.g. Nakamoto, 2007). Therefore, the influence of text features (e.g. word length) on how demanding texts are may be different in 3rd and 4th grade.
Expository texts have a different structure than narrative texts in addition to being more linguistically complex. For instance, content overlap serves a different function in expository texts than narrative texts (e.g. Sheehan et al., 2014).
This leads to the question: “Is the effect of specific text features on reading demands different between grade levels and between text genres”?
Method
Reading demands were determined with an item difficulty model (Explanatory Item Response Theory; De Boeck & Wilson, 2004). Response data came from a cross-sectional (N = 2059) sample of German 3rd and 4th grades with a longitudinal subsample (N = 195). Students answered a subset of items drawn from a pool consisting of 145 items across 95 unique text passages. Task features were coded and text features were analyzed using a computer-linguistic program that assesses lexical, syntactic and semantic complexity, as well as (text) cohesion (similar to Coh-Metrix; Graesser, et al. 2004). Text and task features were used to explain the variance in item difficulty across 3rd and 4th grade.
Results and discussion
Results indicated that lexical and syntactic complexity had the strongest influence on item difficulty. Additionally, beyond the effect of lexical and syntactic complexity, expository texts were overall more difficult than narrative texts. Together with the task demand ‘summarize information across sentences’, expository texts became disproportionally easier from 3rd to 4th grade. Importantly, the text genre effect was not fully explained by lexical and syntactical complexity alone.
Our results indicate that specific text features contribute to changes in reading demands from 3rd to 4th grade. Even if students can comprehend linguistically complex narrative texts, educators should consider linguistically simpler expository texts to better align reading demands with reading ability, especially for 3rd grade.

Authors

• Ulrich Ludewig, TU Dort­mund University

• Theresa Schlitter, Technical University Dortmund

• Matthias Trendtel, Bundesinstitut fur Bildungsforschung

• Detmar Meurers

• Zarah Weiss, University of Tübingen

• Nele McElvany, TU Dortmund University