Questionnaire designers use readability measures to ensure that questions can be understood by the target population. The most common measure is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level, but other formulas exist. This article compares six different readability measures across 150 questions in a self-administered questionnaire, finding notable variation in…

Much of the contemporary literature around assessment practices in higher education focuses on assessment quality and its fitness for purpose. However, there is limited research around student comprehension of written assessment task descriptions and their understanding of the task itself. The purpose of this study was to examine a number of…

In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…

The purpose of this article is to understand the function, logic, and impact of qualitative systems for analyzing text complexity, focusing on their benefits and imperfections. We identified two primary functions for their use: (a) to match texts to reader ability so that readers read books that are within their grasp, and (b) to unearth, and then…

Reading materials are considered having high readability if readers are interested to read the materials, understand the content of the materials and able to read the materials fluently. In contrast, reading materials with low readability discourage readers from reading the materials, create difficulties for readers to understand the content of…

Background: Readability tests are indicators that measure how easy a document can be read and understood. Simple, but very often ignored, readability statistics cannot only provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents but also can increase an evaluator's credibility. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Validates the college-level designation of the Fry Graph using comparative validity data. (AEA)

A formula for assessing style is described and applied to compositions written by adult students of English as a second language. Style is defined as the total effect of what is done by a writer in the composing process, including choice of words, organization, and sentence and paragraph strategies. Earlier attempts to quantify style are reviewed.…

Proposes that documents such as contracts, policies, etc. can be evaluated adequately only by analyzing how they are used by consumers and then designing a testing approach that reflects their usability rather than their readability, difficulty, etc. Tested versions of a loan contract to compare differences among evaluation procedures. (PD)

A method proposed by McCuaig and Hutchings to assess the internal readability variation of books using the Fry readability formula was empirically tested in an analysis of six elementary basal and ten secondary remedial readers. Each book was treated as a series of consecutive 100-word samples. Means and standard deviations were computed for both…

Although the cloze procedure was shown to be satisfactorily reliable with deaf Ss, cloze scores did not relate to the predicted passage difficulty; therefore, the validity of the cloze procedure as a readability measure was not confirmed. (Author/DLS)

On the assumption that the verbal complexity of written examination materials used to select personnel for a job should be similar to the verbal complexity of materials that must be read and understood on the job, the Flesch Reading Ease Index was applied to samples of the reading materials required for successful entry-level job performance in…

Examples are provided that show readability in action in diverse settings. The first shows how readability analysis resulted in a new fluency monitoring protocol in three school districts in Northern California. The others present hypothetical school, clinic, and research situations that a speech language pathologist might encounter. (Author/CR)