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…

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…

Among the problems of using readability formulas in education are: reporting standardized scores as grade levels is often meaningless since in a single grade classroom there may be children reading two or three grades above or below grade placement; social mobility, busing policies, and changed patterns of living have increased the heterogeneity…

Noting that readability formulas are strictly text-based and therefore do not reflect the interactive nature of the reading process, this paper argues that many of the instructional material evaluations for which such formulas are used are inappropriate and offers more reader-based alternatives to the use of formulas. The first half of the paper…

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.…

The failure of readability formulas can be attributed to three weaknesses in the formulas. First, they ignore or violate current knowledge about the reading process. Most formulas affect only sentence length and word difficulty while ignoring factors that influence text comprehensibility, such as cohesion, the number of inferences required, the…

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…

Readability formulas can be useful tools in accomplishing their primary purpose--to give very general estimates of difficulty. Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding regarding their use, which has resulted in misuse and abuse. The formulas were designed to be applied post hoc to existing materials. They were not intended to…

Discusses the history of the development of the measurement of reading levels and current criticism of the use of reading levels. Also discusses the relationship between a teacher's effectiveness as a reading instructor and the teacher's understanding about the concept of reading levels. Includes suggestions for change and a list of references.…

This article explores the relationships between vocabulary knowledge and text readability. It discusses how procedures used by readability formulas to assess the vocabulary factor can over- or underestimate text difficulty by counting syllables rather than assessing what the reader knows about the words in a text. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

These exercises and examples pertain to readability information presented in preceding articles. They are designed to help speech language pathologists test their intuitions about word and text difficulty and to see readability data from a number of quantitative formulas applied to passages across a wide range of levels. (Contains 8 references.)…

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)