In the latest American Education Research Journal, Assistant Professor Candace Walkington and two co-authors use 20 years of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study to look at readability factors in mathematics word problems.
Walkington and colleagues analyze length, word difficulty, and pronouns. They also interact with student background characteristics—such as race/ethnicity, mathematics achievement, and socioeconomic status. Textual features that make problems more difficult to process appear to differentially negatively impact struggling students, while features that make language easier to process appear to differentially positively impact struggling students.