Text Complexity

Module 3 DB Post Questions: What are the key points you took away from the videos about text complexity and the readings this week when it comes to determining the text that you choose for your classrooms and the strategies you use with students to access it? What stood out to you most? When I look for a text to share with my middle school science students, I will take into consideration the complexity of the text and the strategies that will best help my students access the text to the best of their ability. Before watching the videos and doing the readings this week, I was pretty sure that text complexity was mostly about the text’s length or amount of ‘hard’ vocabulary. I was partially correct. Wessling defines text complexity as presenting students with texts and reading tasks that consistently push students out of their comfort zone. I really like the idea of “layering text” by presenting students with three or more different kinds of text all about the same topic. For example, when I teach evolution to my 7th graders, I could show them a Far Side cartoon depicting dinosaurs smoking, a journal article about the evolution of whales, and “The World of the Dinosaurs” music video on YouTube (Channel: MelodySheep-Symphony of Science). I feel that by “layering the text” on this topic, I can help my students visualize and understand more about evolution that they would get by just reading the textbook and answering questions. This summer, I will be working with the two other science teachers at my school to choose new science textbooks. After preparing for this week’s module, I know that I will need to pay attention to much more than just Lexile scores when I consider appropriate texts for my students. According to the Common Core State Standards for ELA & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, there are three factors I must take into consideration when I’m choosing texts: qualitative evaluation of the text, quantitative evaluation of the text, and matching the reader to the text and the task. Qualitative evaluation of the text can be completed by software that evaluates the number of words, length of sentences, and Lexile scores. Quantitative evaluation of the text is a bit more subjective as it must be measured by humans and includes things like language difficulty and determining what background knowledge is necessary to fully understand the text. Finally, I’ll also have to consider matching the student to the text and the task so that I take into consideration what my students are bringing to the assignment, as well as what they are supposed to do with the text. Wessling had a good suggestion here, stating that the difficulty of the concepts and text complexity have an inverse relationship. For example, when I teach my students about the life cycle of stars, which is a very complicated topic, the text I use should be simple in its complexity. The reasoning here is that students shouldn’t have to struggle with both the task and the text at the same time, nor should they be too easy. My final major take-away from this week’s module was that I can employ disciplinary questioning techniques to help my students make better connections with the text and task for my students. Both biological and physical sciences use 6 levels of thinking in self questioning while reading a text: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering. However, biological sciences also puts more emphasis on self-questioning strategies about classifying information. I have taught secondary science (both biological and physical) for almost 16 years, and have never made that distinction on my own. From now on, I’m going to try to think about how to make my science texts more accessible to my students by taking into consideration the degree of distinction between texts about a physical or biological concept. References: Buehl, D. (2014) Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. (34-38) McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness (2nd ed.). Pearson. Wessling, S. B. (n.d.). Simplifying Text Complexity. Retrieved April 04, 2018, from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/simplifying-text-complexity#