Rereading Our Past: The Cognitive Demands of Reading and Reading Comprehension, 1900-2010

• In Event: School Accountability: Methods, Mandates, and Curriculum

Abstract

We report on one component of a larger, multiyear project that offers a new approach for analyzing the relative cognitive complexity of the reading curriculum over the past century. Our study is composed of several intersecting phases that constitute a blend of historical, psychological, and linguistic methods. We collected reading textbooks from 113 series; this broad collection consists of 297 unique books, published between 1899 and 2010. Our findings demonstrate that—despite popular conceptions about a persistent drop in school quality in the US—there have been some significant increases in both lexical difficulty and lexical diversity within student reading texts in recent decades. Our findings do not support the story that the American school curriculum has experienced continual decline.

Authors

• David A. Gamson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Xiaofei Lu, The Pennsylvania State University

• Sarah Anne Eckert, Notre Dame of Maryland University

• Hilary Knipe Swank, Plymouth State University

• Perri Hammershlag, The Pennsylvania State University