Although United States community college enrollment rose in Fall 2023, the community college sector as a whole has contracted by 37% since 2010, representing over 2.6 million students. As a result, community college practitioners, specifically, those working in admissions and enrollment management should ensure that admissions instructions are…

Reading texts may serve as a vital source of informational content and language knowledge for second language (L2) learners, which is known as the dual relevance of L2 reading (Han & D'Angelo, 2009). Text complexity, however, influences the two, determining to a great extent whether the dual outcome is attainable. Drawing on Complex Dynamic…

Research suggests that L2 students (English-language learners) do not access postsecondary education as the same level as L1 (native English-speaking) peers. Using a computational linguistics approach, this study analyzes financial aid application instructions from 341 randomly selected four-year, Title IV-participating U.S. institutions. Results…

This study reports the perceptions and understanding of extensive reading (ER) of 259 ER practitioners in Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, and Vietnam. The majority of participants understood the core principles of ER, namely (a) the fluent reading of (b) a lot of (c) easy texts. However, about 25% of the participants in Thailand, Mongolia, and Vietnam…

Purpose: The need for psychometrically sound measurement approaches to social work educational outcomes assessment is increasing. Method: The research reported here describes an original and two replication studies of a new scale (N = 550) designed to assess an individual's self-efficacy regarding social work competencies specified by the Council…

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and…

This paper uses an action research intervention in an attempt to improve student engagement with summative feedback. The intervention delivered summative module feedback to the students as audio recordings, replacing the written method employed in previous years. The project found that students are keen on audio as an alternative to written…

The assessment of learning in large online courses requires tools that are valid, reliable, easy to administer, and can be automatically scored. We have evaluated an online assessment and learning tool called Knowledge Assembly, or Knowla. Knowla measures a student's knowledge in a particular subject by having the student assemble a set of…

A corpus of current editions of statistics textbooks was assessed to compare aspects and levels of readability for the topics of "measures of center," "line of fit," "regression analysis," and "regression inference." Analysis with lexical software of these text selections revealed that the large corpus can…

The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One…

The "TextEvaluator"® text analysis tool is a fully automated text complexity evaluation tool designed to help teachers, curriculum specialists, textbook publishers, and test developers select texts that are consistent with the text complexity guidelines specified in the Common Core State Standards.This paper documents the procedure used…

This paper reports the effects of the properties of source texts on summarization. One hundred and fifty-seven undergraduates were asked to write summaries of one of three extended English texts of similar length and readability, but differing in other discoursal features such as lexical diversity and macro-organization. The effects of…

Investigates whether news stories that are easier to read will be more positively evaluated by readers. Finds no support for that hypothesis. Suggests that intriguing topics might attract and challenge all readers and potential readers because reader interest appears to be accompanied by a host of other positive reactions. (RS)

This article describes the results of a survey of the readability of most of the intermediate and advanced accounting textbooks currently in use at colleges and universities throughout the United States. (CT)

Found that standard readability indexes by themselves are not useful in measuring readability and comprehensibility of income tax material. Also casts doubt on the use of only readability indexes to measure insurance, labor, and real estate contracts. (PD)