Russ on Reading: PARCC Math Test Readability

Russ on Reading: PARCC Math Test Readability:

PARCC Math Test Readability

Two weeks ago I ventured into the world of PARCC testing with several posts on the readability of the reading comprehension passages of the new Common Core aligned PARCC tests, which are being administered right now in many states. You can find those postshere, here and here. Some readers expressed concern about the readability of the PARCC math exams and asked me to take a look at it.

Background: Readability on a math exam matters. While we might assume that a math exam assesses a students ability to perform various mathematical computations, all of the math questions on the PARCC required some literacy skills as well. A study by Abedi and Lord published in Applied Measurement in Education found that linguistic complexity of math word problems can have a significant impact on the test scores of inexperienced problem solvers, English Language Learners and students with disabilities. The question that must be asked is simply, "Does the PARCC measure computation skills or a combination of literacy skills and computation skills?" And we might further ask, "Will students with on grade level reading skills be disadvantaged by the reading required on the math exam?"

Method: I will not rehash all my reservations about readability measures here. You can look at the posts on the reading comprehension part of the PARCC if you would like a fuller explanation. Suffice it to say here that readability measures can only give us an approximation of the difficulty of any one text on any one reader, so all results need to be taken with a grain of salt.

For the purposes of this post, I looked at the PARCC Mathematics Practice Texts. In order to get a sample of 300 hundred words to do a readability Russ on Reading: PARCC Math Test Readability: