This study addresses the need in discourse psychology for computational techniques that analyze text on multiple levels of cohesion and text difficulty. Discourse psychologists often investigate phenomena related to discourse processing using lengthy texts containing multiple paragraphs, as opposed to single word and sentence stimuli.…

Sixty-one psychology textbooks were analyzed according to four criteria: student acceptance and interest, readability and human interest, comprehensiveness and size, and psychobiological content. This analytic approach can be used in all subjects to match text selection with course objectives in order to increase student satisfaction. (AM)

Reports on two studies that assessed the interchangeability of logical and empirical estimates of readability and human interest for college-level introductory psychology texts published between 1977 and 1988. Uses Flesch's procedures to obtain logical scores and student ratings to obtain empirical scores. Finds that correlations are too low to…

Background: Considerable evidence suggests that structured abstracts in scientific journal articles are more informative than traditional ones, but no one (to our knowledge) has written about asking psychology undergraduates to write structured abstracts for their laboratory reports. Aim: Our aim was to assess whether or not the quality of such…

Undergraduate students enrolled in a Principles of Psychology II course were asked to rate selections from introductory psychology texts for reading ease. These student ratings were then compared with the ratings obtained using the Flesch readability formula. Student ratings did not agree very well with the Flesch scores. (RM)