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Nese, Joseph F. T.; Alonzo, Julie; Biancarosa, Gina; Kamata, Akihito; Kahn, Joshua – Grantee Submission, 2017
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…
Descriptors: Reading Comprehension, Difficulty Level, Readability, Sentence Structure
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Gala, Núria; Billami, Mokhtar B.; François, Thomas; Bernhard, Delphine – Research-publishing.net, 2015
Computational tools and resources play an important role for vocabulary acquisition. Although a large variety of dictionaries and learning games are available, few resources provide information about the complexity of a word, either for learning or for comprehension. The idea here is to use frequency counts combined with intralexical variables to…
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Lexicology, Difficulty Level, Word Frequency
Holcomb, Carol Ann – 1982
At the conclusion of their study on home pregnancy test kits, Valinas and Perlman (1982) suggested that the instructions accompanying the kits be revised to make them easier to read. A study was undertaken to determine the readability of the printed instructions accompanying five home pregnancy test kits (Daisy II, Answer, Acu-Test, Predictor, and…
Descriptors: Difficulty Level, Pregnancy, Readability, Readability Formulas
Fry, Edward – 1986
Even though readability formulas are being used more widely than ever before in schools, libraries, businesses, newspapers, and government, there are critics who argue against their use. Criticism includes blaming the formulas for the "dumbing down" of textbooks, for being poor writers' guides, and for not taking into account the background or…
Descriptors: Content Analysis, Difficulty Level, Readability, Readability Formulas
Fry, Edward – 1989
A new readability formula is designed to work on passages that are 40 to 99 words long, while existing readability formulas require a passage of 300 words or longer. The new formula requires the passage to have at least three sentences and is reliable for the fourth through the twelfth grades. (Four figures which demonstrate the use of the formula…
Descriptors: Content Analysis, Difficulty Level, Intermediate Grades, Readability
Hahn, Joan M.; Goldman, Susan R. – 1983
Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Content Analysis, Difficulty Level, Intermediate Grades
Anderson, Jonathan – 1981
"Lasbarhetsindex" ("Lix") is a readability formula developed in Sweden that holds promise for assessing text difficulty in other languages, including English. So far three separate studies have been conducted to test Lix with French and English texts, with German and English texts, and with Greek and English texts. In all three…
Descriptors: Content Analysis, Difficulty Level, English, Foreign Countries
Kidder, Steven J. – 1977
The utility and precision of scaling 200 relatively short reading passages were analyzed using a Rasch-based measurement technique as compared to readability estimates using the Spache or Dale-Chall formulas. In addition, a regression model was specified for predicting the grade level of a text a student could literally comprehend based on…
Descriptors: Cloze Procedure, Difficulty Level, Elementary Secondary Education, Readability
Klare, George R. – 1981
Two studies investigated the relationships between readability, prior knowledge, and interest in the material being read. In the first study, 169 college freshmen read cloze passages of materials from the Nelson-Denny Reading Tests, then one week later read the whole passages and completed the related multiple choice questions. A control group…
Descriptors: College Freshmen, Difficulty Level, High School Seniors, Prior Learning
Haugh, Oscar M. – 1975
Readability has been gauged by such means as determining the length of individual words in a passage, analyzing types of sentences, and assessing numbers of subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, modifiers, and so on. Probably the most successful formula has been the Dale-Chall method, which measures readability by determining the percentage…
Descriptors: Cloze Procedure, Difficulty Level, Elementary Secondary Education, Evaluation Methods
Harwell, Michael; Lim, Brenda – 1996
The learning difficulties described by students in statistics courses continue to engage researchers from several disciplines. One source of difficulty for graduate students in educational statistics courses is the reading difficulty of the textbook. Instructors making decisions about a textbook typically have little information about the reading…
Descriptors: Difficulty Level, Education Majors, Graduate Students, Graduate Study
Fry, Edward – 1986
Readability formulas have varied uses. In education they are used to match children's reading ability to the difficulty level of material, select stories and books for classroom use and for individual students' particular needs, select textbooks and other reading materials, aid educational research, and check reading materials of newly literate…
Descriptors: Business, Content Analysis, Difficulty Level, Educational Research
Bolden, Bernadine J.; Stoddard, Ann – 1980
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…
Descriptors: Difficulty Level, Elementary Education, Kernel Sentences, Multiple Choice Tests