Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

Standards for literacy in the twenty-first century raise the bar on the complexity of texts and the tasks for which they are used. The strengths and limitations of contemporary approaches to text complexity are discussed with respect to major points raised in the six articles in this special issue. In addition, four features of text that are of…

One problem with readability formulas is that they are generally calculated on factors at the sentence and subsentence level. However, the representation of text through information structures is equally important. The complexity of information structures and their realizations will affect reading difficulty and should be incorporated into…

This study examined the effect of two ways of question phrasing as related to three styles of expository writing on the test performance of elementary school children. Multiple-choice questions were developed for sets of passages which were written using three different syntactic structures; and which had different levels of difficulty. The…