Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

To better understand Tennessee's new standardized science assessments, this quantitative study utilized a nonexperimental, descriptive-comparative design to compare the readability of the long-used science TCAP assessment with the newly created science TNReady assessment in grades three, four, and five. As new standards in the state boast higher…

Response time has been used as an important predictor of student performance in various models. Much of this work is based on the hypothesis that if students respond to a problem step too quickly or too slowly, they are most likely to be unsuccessful in that step. However, something that is less explored is that students may cycle through…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

This study examined the extent to which prior beliefs and reading instructions impacted elements of a reader's mental representation of multiple texts. College students' beliefs about childhood vaccinations were assessed before reading two anti-vaccine and two pro-vaccine texts. Participants in the experimental condition read for the purpose of…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

Education is central to promoting healthy, active lifestyles, but most educational materials may be less than suitable for public dissemination. Related kinesiology studies have mainly focused on the reading grade level of print materials. Suitability encompasses more qualities than that and also concerns digital media. This study had two…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

Nowadays, text readability is of great importance. Simple but very often ignored, readability statistics can provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents and increase an evaluator's credibility. Hence, this research aims to examine the readability index of the test instrument for BIPA (Bahasa…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

This article evaluates the mandatory English as a foreign language textbooks provided by the government in Chile in terms of readability and types of questions. Three readability formulas are used to analyze the texts: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Coh-Metrix L2 reading index (RDL2). To evaluate the cognitive demands that…

To investigate how readability affects the way adults who are learning to read evaluate health information, a mixed methods research study was designed based on a sociotechnical framework and using theories of everyday life information seeking. The study analyzed a corpus of consumer health information documents (N = 501) using the CohMetrix text…

This report sets out the findings of the technical development work completed as part of the Use Cases for Generative AI in Education project, commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) in September 2023. It has been published alongside the User Research Report, which sets out the findings from the ongoing user engagement activity…

Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

While hierarchical machine learning approaches have been used to classify texts into different content areas, this approach has, to our knowledge, not been used in the automated assessment of text difficulty. This study compared the accuracy of four classification machine learning approaches (flat, one-vs-one, one-vs-all, and hierarchical) using…