Page 31 - 2023_Jour_89-5

▷Linsear Write Formula. This formula was developed for the United States
Air Force to calculate readability of technical manuals. The formula uses
sentence length and the number of words with three or more syllables per 100
words of text (Brewer, 2018).
▷Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) Index. The SMOG, which
was created by McLaughlin (1969), was first used to evaluate healthcare
material. The formula counts every word with three or more syllables within
30 sentences. This formula is appropriate for Grade 4 to college-age readers. Dr. Christopher Long is
▷The Automated Readability Index (ARI). This formula was created to an assistant professor at
use computers to calculate the readability of text. The formula uses ratios the University of North
Texas, with a teaching
representing the number of letters per word and the number of words per focus on K–12 science
sentence (Kincaid et al., 1975). education and pedagogy.
His research interests
Readability Calculation include preservice teacher
Calculations for the textbooks in this study happened in several steps. Each education, science
textbook had three different calculations, as the formula requires looking at the education, and classroom
learning environments.
beginning, middle, and end (BME) of each textbook. BME is used to account for
the whole textbook, as all formulas say to select three 100-word passages. Thus, Chris.Long@UNT.edu
the number of pages in each textbook was divided by three to determine the page
ranges that represented the BME of the text. Then three pages were chosen from
each range. Next, the text from the beginning part of the textbook was typed into
the free readability calculator and statistics were calculated. The same process was
followed for selections from the middle and end of the textbook. Finally, the three
numbers were averaged to determine the readability of the whole text.

Results
In the Table, the mean score results (last column) are the average of 10 different
formulas for all grade levels (except Grade 4, which includes the result of 11 different
formulas averaged together). When comparing the readability averages between the
two series, Grade 1 scored 4.33 and 3.58, which put the readability of the texts
in both series nearly 3 years
above what Grade 1 students

Even though readability can read and understand.Scores
for Grade 2 were 3.75 and 3.50,
formulas cannot tell if which indicates the textbook
readability in both series at only
the target audience will 2 years above grade level.
The data indicated that
understand the text, they these two top-of-the-adoption-

can reveal if a text is written list science textbooks for
Grades 1–7 are still too hard for
at the correct grade level for students to read and understand.
However, the readability scores
the students for whom the of the Grade 8 textbooks were

textbook was written. 8.50 and 8.08, which is less
than a 1-year difference, thus
suggesting these textbooks are
easier for students to read and
understand.

Educators’ Choice 29