tl;dr
Readability formulas measure how easy a piece of writing is to understand. There are many different formulas, each calculating readability with a slighlty different approach, but generally they use a combination of word and sentence length to estimate text difficulty.
The mainstream origin of readability can be traced back to journalism in the 1940's when publishers realized more readable articles increase newspaper circulation.
Shown here are the results from a selection of studies confirming newspapers becoming more readable over time. This graph is a modified version of the Gunning-Fog readability index that translates numerical readability calculations to US school grade reading levels.
The readability trend has been studied in numerous sources outside of newspapers including the New York Times best seller list and High School English Curriculums. Certain states even mandate that their insurance forms must meet minimum readability levels.
Readability is especially important on social media where the most popular posts are often highly readable.
One exception to this trend are sources that require domain specific language like legal, business and scientific writing.
The objective of readability is to improve the ease at which a reader can understand writing.
With everything becoming more readable, let's look at how student reading abilities have changed over time.
On the nation's largest reading comprehension test, the scores for High School seniors have been on a downward trend for over 30 years.
A national trend like this suggests a broad cultural change rather than localized failings with individual districts.
The National Assessment for Educational Progress, who administers the test, has found that how much time a student spends reading for fun outside of school is a strong indicator of how well a student will perform on a reading comprehension assessment.
Reading for fun has been steadily declining from almost 1 out of every 3 students reading for fun in 1984 to under 1 out of every 5 in 2012.
A global study by the Organization for Economic Development also found that students who read a variety of media perform better on reading comprehension assessments. The strongest readers include books as part of their media variety.
There isn't a definitive reason for why books improve reading comprehension, but it is suggested that books foster a deeper learning of the subject matter compared with shorter formats.
To fully understand why students with strong general knowledge perform better on reading comprehension assessments it's necessary to break down the mechanics behind reading.
Reading comprehension is the process of reading text to understand its meaning.
In the construction-integration model, blue areas represent the three levels of comprehension that occur in parallel while reading. White areas indicate the start and end of this process with the written text at the bottom and understanding by the reader at the top.
Text meaning is constructed in the first two levels: words are defined and connected to form ideas. It’s in this phase that readability can contribute to the comprehension process by speeding up how quickly a reader understands the text.
In the third level, the text’s meaning is linked with existing knowledge not written on the page, this is where the benefits of a strong outside knowledge are realized.
In short-text formats the comprehension process happens quickly. But as text increases in length, new intra-text relationships are established which require a strong focus from the reader to capture the full meaning.
The pattern shown here represents the familiar traditional linear reading pattern. With longer-text this requires deep focus to ensure all ideas and relationships within the text are captured.
Research has shown that when reading online people prefer to skim, often resulting in the F-shape pattern shown here. This is an effective strategy when looking for specific answers on a website or responding to emails but ideas are missed if the text is meant to be read in its entirety.
A number of educators are concerned this skimming approach is carrying over to all types of reading, negatively impacting how today’s students read.
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tl;dr |
For educators, establish good reading habits beyond the classroom. Everyone else, this is a friendly reminder to pick-up a good book. |