To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Readability.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Readability'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Readability.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Smith, Christian. "Automatic summarization and readability." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-68332.
Full textAbstract:
The enormous amount of information available today within different media gives rise to the notion of ways to reduce the inevitable complexity and to distribute text material to different channels or media. In an effort to investigate the possibilities of a tool to help eleviate the problem, an automatic summarizer called COGSUM has been developed and evaluated with regards to the informational quality of the summaries and with regards to the readability. COGSUM is based on word space methodology, including virtues such as problematic computational complexity and possibilities of inferring semantic relations. The results from the evaluations show how to set some parameters in order to get as good summary as possible and that the resulting summaries have higher readability score than the full text on different genres.
2
Sjöholm, Johan. "Probability as readability : A new machine learning approach to readability assessment for written Swedish." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, NLPLAB - Laboratoriet för databehandling av naturligt språk, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-78107.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the possibility of assessing the degree of readability of writtenSwedish using machine learning. An application using four levels of linguistic analysishas been implemented and tested with four different established algorithmsfor machine learning. The new approach has then been compared to establishedreadability metrics for Swedish. The results indicate that the new method workssignificantly better for readability classification of both sentences and documents.The system has also been tested with so called soft classification which returns aprobability for the degree of readability of a given text. This probability can thenbe used to rank texts according to probable degree of readability.Detta examensarbete utforskar möjligheterna att bedöma svenska texters läsbarhet med hjälp av maskininlärning. Ett system som använder fyra nivåer av lingvistisk analys har implementerats och testats med fyra olika etablerade algoritmer för maskininlärning. Det nya angreppssättet har sedan jämförts med etablerade läsbarhetsmått för svenska. Resultaten visar att den nya metoden fungerar markant bättre för läsbarhetsklassning av både meningar och hela dokument. Systemet har också testats med så kallad mjuk klassificering som ger ett sannolikhetsvärde för en given texts läsbarhetsgrad. Detta sannolikhetsvärde kan användas för rangordna texter baserad på sannolik läsbarhetsgrad.
3
Larsson, Martin, and Samuel Ljungberg. "Readability: Man and Machine : Using readability metrics to predict results from unsupervised sentiment analysis." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-301842.
Full textAbstract:
Readability metrics assess the ease with which human beings read and understand written texts. With the advent of machine learning techniques that allow computers to also analyse text, this provides an interesting opportunity to investigate whether readability metrics can be used to inform on the ease with which machines understand texts. To that end, the specific machine analysed in this paper uses word embeddings to conduct unsupervised sentiment analysis. This specification minimises the need for labelling and human intervention, thus relying heavily on the machine instead of the human. Across two different datasets, sentiment predictions are made using Google’s Word2Vec word embedding algorithm, and are evaluated to produce a dichotomous output variable per sentiment. This variable, representing whether a prediction is correct or not, is then used as the dependent variable in a logistic regression with 17 readability metrics as independent variables. The resulting model has high explanatory power and the effects of readability metrics on the results from the sentiment analysis are mostly statistically significant. However, metrics affect sentiment classification in the two datasets differently, indicating that the metrics are expressions of linguistic behaviour unique to the datasets. The implication of the findings is that readability metrics could be used directly in sentiment classification models to improve modelling accuracy. Moreover, the results also indicate that machines are able to pick up on information that human beings do not pick up on, for instance that certain words are associated with more positive or negative sentiments.Läsbarhetsmått bedömer hur lätt eller svårt det är för människor att läsa och förstå skrivna texter. Eftersom nya maskininlärningstekniker har utvecklats kan datorer numera också analysera texter. Därför är en intressant infallsvinkel huruvida läsbarhetsmåtten också kan användas för att bedöma hur lätt eller svårt det är för maskiner att förstå texter. Mot denna bakgrund använder den specifika maskinen i denna uppsats ordinbäddningar i syfte att utföra oövervakad sentimentanalys. Således minimeras behovet av etikettering och mänsklig handpåläggning, vilket resulterar i en mer djupgående analys av maskinen istället för människan. I två olika dataset jämförs rätt svar mot sentimentförutsägelser från Googles ordinbäddnings-algoritm Word2Vec för att producera en binär utdatavariabel per sentiment. Denna variabel, som representerar om en förutsägelse är korrekt eller inte, används sedan som beroende variabel i en logistisk regression med 17 olika läsbarhetsmått som oberoende variabler. Den resulterande modellen har högt förklaringsvärde och effekterna av läsbarhetsmåtten på resultaten från sentimentanalysen är mestadels statistiskt signifikanta. Emellertid är effekten på klassificeringen beroende på dataset, vilket indikerar att läsbarhetsmåtten ger uttryck för olika lingvistiska beteenden som är unika till datamängderna. Implikationen av resultaten är att läsbarhetsmåtten kan användas direkt i modeller som utför sentimentanalys för att förbättra deras prediktionsförmåga. Dessutom indikerar resultaten också att maskiner kan plocka upp på information som människor inte kan, exempelvis att vissa ord är associerade med positiva eller negativa sentiment.
4
Öquist, Gustav. "Evaluating Readability on Mobile Devices." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-7378.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis presents findings from five readability studies performed on mobile devices. The dynamic Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) format has been enhanced with regard to linguistic adaptation and segmentation as well as eye movement modeling. The novel formats have been evaluated against other common presentation formats including Paging, Scrolling, and Leading in latin-square balanced repeated-measurement studies with 12-16 subjects. Apart from monitoring Reading speed, Comprehension, and Task load (NASA-TLX), Eye movement tracking has been used to learn more about how the text presentation affects reading.
The Page format generally offered best readability. Reading on a mobile phone decreased reading speed by 10% compared to reading on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), an interesting finding given that the display area of the mobile phone was 50% smaller. Scrolling, the most commonly used presentation format on mobile devices today, proved inferior to both Paging and RSVP. Leading, the most widely known dynamic format, caused very unnatural eye movements for reading. This seems to have increased task load, but not affected reading speed to a similar extent. The RSVP format displaying one word at time was found to reduce eye movements significantly, but contrary to common claims, this resulted in decreased reading speed and increased task load. In the last study, Predictive Text Presentation (PTP) was introduced. The format is based on RSVP and combines linguistic chunking and adaptation with eye movement modeling to achieve a reading experience that can rival traditional text presentation.
It is explained why readability on mobile devices is important, how it may be evaluated in an efficient and yet reliable manner, and PTP is pinpointed as the format with greatest potential for improvement. The methodology used in the evaluations and the shortcomings of the studies are discussed. Finally, a hyper-graeco-latin-square experimental design is proposed for future evaluations.
5
Öquist, Gustav. "Evaluating readability on mobile devices /." Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis(AUU) : Universitetsbiblioteket [distributör], 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-7378.
Full text
6
Newbold, Neil. "New approaches for text readability." Thesis, University of York, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.583378.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis describes new approaches to text readability that can help in making written communications more readily understood. The research aims to undergo a deeper exploration of readability and the properties of text that make it easier to understand. The work will attempt to gain an improved understanding of the relationship between text and the reader and propose new methods for assessing readability that will move away from existing surface measures of readability. These existing readability formulas, in spite of their popularity, raise various concerns in failing to detect a number of common writing problems because their focus is largely on word and sentence length. Many users also attempt to improve their writing on the basis of the results produced by these formulas, but acting on the basis of a single numerical output for an entire text presents difficulties in locating troublesome writing. There is criticism, also, that the existing readability formulas were validated using out-dated school grades. In our research, we are taking an extended view of readability that incorporates features of text cohesion, propositional density, word familiarity and the abilities and knowledge of the reader. We have devised a framework that incorporates these features, and derived a number of new configurable measures of readability that can provide reader-specific scoring. Some of the new measures can be applied at sentence level to direct authors to specific writing problems and provide automated feedback on their resolution. To assess the success of our new approaches, we critique and assess existing methods for evaluating readability measures. We use reader preferences over short text passages, when controlled for other features of readability to evaluating our readability methods. We found close agreement between the new measures and reader preferences, demonstrating that the measures can be configured to provide agreement for different types of reader. In addition, we devised a new method for evaluating readability measures using reading times from eye-tracking data. One of our measures, for word familiarity, shows a strong correlation (0.941) with average reading time in comparison to the next best performing existing readability measure (0.906). This particular measure incorporates sentence length in characters, due to the finding of a significant correlation (0.963) between sentence-level reading time and sentence length in characters. The latter indicates that character counts might reflect sentence-level text difficulty rather more accurately than the existing readability measures but would be insufficient alone to offer targeted feedback, and our combination is advantageous even with the cost of a slightly lowered correlation. Using the word familiarity measure, we have also derived a way to estimate how much reading time can be saved by improving readability. We demonstrate our approach in several software prototypes which can provide additional automated feedback to users on how to improve their readability. One ofthese prototypes, for Open Office, has generated over 12,000 downloads to date.
7
Hansson, Axel, and Marcus Lönnqvist. "Compressibility as Proxy for Readability." Thesis, Mittuniversitetet, Institutionen för data- och systemvetenskap, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:miun:diva-43180.
Full textAbstract:
This study’s main objective is to examine if there is acorrelation between readability and compressibility of Java code. The code readability is important to softwaremaintainability and the comprehension of the code, and thiscan be verified and tested with a range of different metricssuch as B&W, Scalabrino and Dorn’s readability metric.Should there exist a correlation, compressibility could proveto be a simple yet useful readability metric.Data compression is when code or data is encoded usingfewer bits that its original size. There are several algorithmsto do this, and this study works with some of the mostpopular methods. To examine the correlation, we first testedthe different compression algorithms against each other tosee if there was a major difference in size of the resulting file.After that we compared the compressibility between twodifferent types of written code, with previously establisheddifferences in readability.All in all, the source code from a total of 20 popular GitHubprojects were tested with 3 compression algorithms tocompare the differences between the algorithms. For thecompressibility comparisons between code as relating toreadability, a combined total of 104 code snippets weretested, 52 of each compared coding paradigm.Result: For the first test we concluded that there was nosignificant difference between the compression rates of thealgorithms, ending up roughly within 4% or less of eachother on average.The second result reveals a small difference incompressibility between sets of code using reactive Java andobject-oriented Java. These two paradigms are showing adifference in readability according to earlier research, thoughthe difference in compressibility was so small that it wasconsidered negligible. This is due to a lack of variety ofsnippets tested and the difference can largely be attributed tothe small file sizes of some snippets. The smaller filesincreased in size due to the compression adding an“overhead” when a file is compressed. This is morenoticeable on smaller files which this study tested a lot of.In conclusion, the study was unable to indicate a clearconnection between source code readability andcompressibility. Thus, it does not indicate that compressibility is a suitable proxy for readability as of now.This study does however start a conversation on a topicpreviously untouched, and we hope that this study can pointother studies in the right direction. The scope of this researchis too big to be fully explored in this study alone, and westrongly suggest future research on the topic.
8
Tillman, Robin, and Ludvig Hagberg. "Readability algorithms compability on multiple languages." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC), 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-146017.
Full textAbstract:
This paper aims to test the compatibility of readability algorithms when using text written in dierent languages as parameters, the languages used is Swedish and English. A readability algorithm aims to approximate the readability of a text. Readability can be dened in many ways but the denition used in this paper is simply in which easea text can be read and understood. The tests conducted was done on the Swedish and English version of the same text, hence the readabilityis expected to be fairly alike. Three algorithms was tested, Coleman-Liauindex (CLI), Lasbarhetsindex (LIX) and Automated Readability Index(ARI). The texts used was a collection of Wikipedia articles, "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin and the Bible and their respective translations. The main focus was put into the Wikipedia articles because of the amount of text they consisted of and "On the Origin of Species" due to the similar set of variables in both languages and due to their similar sentence structure. The tests showed that both ARI and LIX works for both Swedish and English on texts which by the the denitions of the formulas are less readable. CLI however seem to perform less well on these higher level texts, but works excellent on the Bible which by all where dened as easy to read. This leads to the conclusion that ARI and LIX work on hard and average texts in both English and Swedish and that CLI work only on easy to rad texts in both languages.
9
Janan, Dahlia. "Towards a new model of readability." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2011. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/51759/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis attempts to develop a new model for a renewed concept of readability. The thesis begins by discussing the rationale for carrying out this research. Next, the extensive literature around the topic of readability is reviewed. The literature suggests that most research into readability has stemmed from a positivist paradigm, and has used quantitative methods to assess text comprehensibility. This approach has been widely criticised and, recently, more qualitative methods stemming from an interpretive paradigm have been employed. It seems that both quantitative and qualitative methods have strengths and limitations. Therefore, the research I have carried out has explored the concept of readability by combining these two research approaches. The data collection methods include readability formulae; text feature analyses; miscue analyses; retellings and interviews. This research has been conducted in the United Kingdom and involved 16 male and 16 female pupils with an age range from 6 to 11 years old. All the participants were fluent readers. Data were analysed using; (1) six online readability formulae - ATOS (1997); Dale-Chall (1948); Flesch-Kincaid (1948); FOG (1952); SMOG (1969); and Spache (1953); (2) Reading Miscue Inventory (Goodman, Watson & Burke, 2005); (3) Judging Richness of Retellings (Irwin & Mitchell, 1983); (4) text feature analysis forms; and (5) a cross-interview analysis approach. Two computer software programmes i.e Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 17) and Qualitative Data Analysis (Nvivo 7) were used to organise and analyse the quantitative and qualitative data. The findings suggest that the concept of readability is influenced by both reader and text factors. The reader factors involve a complex relationship of nine embedded elements within the reader, namely interest, prior knowledge, attitude, reading ability, motivation, purpose of reading, engagement, age and gender. The text factors include eight elements, these being the physical features of the text, genre, content, author, linguistic difficulties, legibility, illustrations and organization of the text. This research comes to the conclusion that the concept of readability is a complex matching process involving the dynamic interaction between both reader and text factors and bound by certain contexts.
10
Lea, Billie. "Readability in business and technical writing." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1985. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/420.
Full text
11
Nielsen, Sebastian, and David Tollemark. "Code readability: Code comments OR self-documenting code : How does the choice affect the readability of the code?" Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för programvaruteknik, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-12739.
Full textAbstract:
Context: Code readability is something every software developer tackles every day. In order for efficient maintainability and learning of a program the documentation needs to be of high quality. Objectives: This thesis is attempting to show what the general perspective the software developers have. We investigate which method that is preferred and why. We will also look at readability and what similarities and differences there are among students and IT professionals. Conclusion: We have collected data from several sources. Firstly from a literature review where different papers within the field are presented. Secondly from two separate surveys conducted on students and IT professionals. From our results we found that documentation is something that software developers heavily rely on and that the need for extensive documentation differs with working experience.
12
Järvbäck, Hillbom Kristina. "Newspaper Readability : a Broadsheet vs. a Tabloid." Thesis, University of Gävle, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-6119.
Full textAbstract:
Is it possible to trace differences in the syntax used in various newspapers and how these differences influence the readability? Earlier studies confirm this and show that it is possible to make a wider distinction between the languages used in for example a broadsheet compared to the language used in a tabloid. In this study, both sentence length and sentence complexity of a broadsheet and a tabloid with a similar political stance were examined in order to find out if it is possible to show differences in readability between the two newspapers.
The articles used in this study are on-line articles and have thus been taken from a search on the internet. In order to obtain adequate research material, ten articles from each newspaper have been used. Five articles from each newspaper website are news articles whereas the remaining five were taken from the culture pages. Regarding sentence length, the average of each article has been calculated. When it comes to sentence complexity, ratios of simple, complex, and compound sentences have been investigated.
The analysis revealed that it is possible to show that there are not any substantial differences in sentence length and sentence complexity between the examined newspapers. However, in contrast to the hypothesis of this study, the examined articles in the tabloid consisted of longer sentences and more complex sentence constructions which, according to earlier research, would be an indication of a more formal language which probably has an effect on readability. Since both examined newspapers are supposed to support the Conservative party, it is, with the result of this study, possible to claim that both newspapers have the same targeted audience.
13
Larsson, Patrik. "Classification into Readability Levels : Implementation and Evaluation." Thesis, Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, 2006. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-7132.
Full textAbstract:
The use for a readability classification model is mainly as an integrated part of an information retrieval system. By matching the user's demands of readability to the documents with the corresponding readability, the classification model can further improve the results of, for example, a search engine. This thesis presents a new solution for classification into readability levels for Swedish. The results from the thesis are a number of classification models. The models were induced by training a Support Vector Machines classifier on features that are established by previous research as good measurements of readability. The features were extracted from a corpus annotated with three readability levels. Natural Language Processing tools for tagging and parsing were used to analyze the corpus and enable the extraction of the features from the corpus. Empirical testings of different feature combinations were performed to optimize the classification model. The classification models render a good and stable classification. The best model obtained a precision score of 90.21\% and a recall score of 89.56\% on the test-set, which is equal to a F-score of 89.88.
Uppsatsen beskriver utvecklandet av en klassificeringsmodell för Svenska texter beroende på dess läsbarhet. Användningsområdet för en läsbaretsklassificeringsmodell är främst inom informationssökningssystem. Modellen kan öka träffsäkerheten på de dokument som anses relevanta av en sökmotor genom att matcha användarens krav på läsbarhet med de indexerade dokumentens läsbarhet. Resultatet av uppsatsen är ett antal modeller för klassificering av text beroende på läsbarhet. Modellerna har tagits fram genom att träna upp en Support Vector Machines klassificerare, på ett antal särdrag som av tidigare forskning har fastslagits vara goda mått på läsbarhet. Särdragen extraherades från en korpus som är annoterad med tre läsbarhetsnivåer. Språkteknologiska verktyg för taggning och parsning användes för att möjliggöra extraktionen av särdragen. Särdragen utvärderades empiriskt i olika särdragskombinationer för att optimera modellerna. Modellerna testades och utvärderades med goda resultat. Den bästa modellen hade en precision på 90,21 och en recall på 89,56, detta ger en F-score som är 89,88. Uppsatsen presenterar förslag på vidareutveckling samt potentiella användningsområden.
14
Altass, Sultan Mohammad O. "Annual report readability and the audit function." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/13501/.
Full textAbstract:
Drawing on agency theory and obfuscation hypothesis, the main focus of this thesis is on the readability of annual reports. It comprises three empirical chapters which examine the readability of annual report and the possible association with the audit function. The effect of auditing on the lexical content of annual report, is to be studied in three different, yet interrelated, auditing topics, namely, audit fees, audit firm tenure, and auditor switching. The results in the first empirical chapter which investigates the association between annual reports readability and audit fees suggests that audit fees is highly statistically associated with the readability of the annual report and this association holds after controlling for different firm specific and financial characteristics. This suggests that high levels of audit fees, measured as fees paid for statutory audit services, may partially explain the quality of the annual report. Contrary to expectations, there is little evidence that non-audit fees, measured as the fees paid for consultancy and other services, have an effect on the readability of the annual report. Nevertheless, this chapter documents a strong statistical association which indicates that total audit fees, measured as the sum of audit and non-audit fees, can capture the economic bond between auditing firms and client management and that higher levels of total audit fees have negative effects on readability. Moreover, I document strong joint relationship between the three measures of fees and firm performance affecting annual report readability and that these interactions show that audit, non-audit and total fees exhibit greater effects in poorly performing firms. The second empirical chapter which investigates the association between the readability of annual reports and audit firm tenure suggests that audit firm tenure has a statistically significant relationship with the readability of annual reports and that longer tenure has a negative relationship with readability. Moreover, I document that, on average, the effect of audit tenure is stronger when the levels of audit fees are low. Finally, the analysis shows that the relationship between audit firm tenure and readability is relatively stronger in firms with weaker solvency levels. The third empirical chapter investigates the association between the readability of annual reports and auditor switching. The analysis suggests that the relationship between annual report readability and auditor switching in general is insignificant. However, after including the interaction term of switching and performance, the regression analysis suggests that when well performing firms switch their auditor they are more likely to disclose difficult-to-read annual report. Moreover, the mitigating effects of audit fees is insignificant in altering the relationship between switching and readability. The interactive relationship between switching and tenure is highly significant which indicates that, within this context, the effect of switching on readability is negative and that this relationship becomes stronger as the tenure increases. In other words, those firms with longer audit tenure are more likely to produce difficult-to-read annual reports than short-tenured clients. Moreover, the analysis of the short-term effects of switching suggests a negative and highly significant relationship between short-term switching and readability. This indicates that switching firms discloses difficult-to-read annual reports during the three years following auditor switching. Similarly, the regression results of the association between annual report readability and auditor switching within a five-year window (long-term) come in line with expectations, the relationship is highly significant and the sign is negative. This implies that firms that switch their auditor will have difficult-to-read annual reports within five years following the switch. However, it has been documented in the analysis that the effect of switching is stronger over a five-year window than short-term (that is three years following the auditor switching), which signifies delayed switching effects on readability. In both models, the mitigating effects of firm performance and audit tenure are statistically significant. In summary, the findings of this thesis suggest that firms utilise the readability of annual report, and that such practice depends on the audit function. Regulators are urged to examine the impact of client/auditor relationship and its influence on the quality of annual report.
15
Daka, Ermira. "Improving readability in automatic unit test generation." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/21312/.
Full textAbstract:
In object-oriented programming, quality assurance is commonly provided through writing unit tests, to exercise the operations of each class. If unit tests are created and maintained manually, this can be a time-consuming and laborious task. For this reason, automatic methods are often used to generate tests that seek to cover all paths of the tested code. Search may be guided by criteria that are opaque to the programmer, resulting in test sequences that are long and confusing. This has a negative impact on test maintenance. Once tests have been created, the job is not done: programmers need to reason about the tests throughout the lifecycle, as the tested software units evolve. Maintenance includes diagnosing failing tests (whether due to a software fault or an invalid test) and preserving test oracles (ensuring that checked assertions are still relevant). Programmers also need to understand the tests created for code that they did not write themselves, in order to understand the intent of that code. If generated tests cannot be easily understood, then they will be extremely difficult to maintain. The overall objective of this thesis is to reaffirm the importance of unit test maintenance; and to offer novel techniques to improve the readability of automatically generated tests. The first contribution is an empirical survey of 225 developers from different parts of the world, who were asked to give their opinions about unit testing practices and problems. The survey responses confirm that unit testing is considered important; and that there is an appetite for higher-quality automated test generation, with a view to test maintenance. The second contribution is a domain-specific model of unit test readability, based on human judgements. The model is used to augment automated unit test generation to produce test suites with both high coverage and improved readability. In evaluations, 30 programmers preferred our improved tests and were able to answer maintenance questions 14level of accuracy. The third contribution is a novel algorithm for generating descriptive test names that summarise API- level coverage goals. Test optimisation ensures that each test is short, bears a clear relation to the covered code, and can be readily identified by programmers. In evaluations, 47 programmers agreed with the choice of synthesised names and that these were as descriptive as manually chosen names. Participants were also more accurate and faster at matching generated tests against the tested code, compared to matching with manually-chosen test names.
16
Zimmerman, Marc Kenton 1975. "Investigating the readability of formal specification languages." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82206.
Full text
17
Jolérus, Henrik, and William Agnér. "Syntax highlighting effects on Java code readability." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-302767.
Full textAbstract:
The readability of Java programs is important for both cost-effectivenesses in Java development and for easing the process of learning and teaching Java programming. Syntax highlighting is used as a tool for increasing code readability through coloring and stylizing parts of code. In this study, 12 participating computer science students (all familiar with Java) were asked to solve 10 Java problems. Some presented problems had syntax highlighting and some not. The problems were basic problems that all focused on retrieving information from code. This problem design was a distinguishing factor of this study in contrast to previous work. The experiments were measured in terms of problem-solving time, the number of correct answers, and eye movements. Results showed, when averaging across all problems and participants, that syntax highlighting had a better average of correct answers by a margin of over 10%. Further, 7 out of 10 problems were completed quicker on average when presented with syntax highlighting, and surveys showed that participants found the problems with syntax highlighting easier to read. However, the results were very inconsistent across problems. In some instances, the fraction of correctness and problem-solving times were better when not using syntax highlighting. The eye-tracking data did not provide much explanation for the results but showed in some instances that syntax highlighting reduced fixations in complex parts of code.Läslighet av Javakod är viktigt, både för kostnadseffektivitet i mjukvaruutveckling och för att förenkla inlärning och utlärning av Javaprogrammering. Syntaxmarkering är ett verktyg för att öka läslighet av kod genom färgning och dekoration av kodsegment. I denna studie deltog 12 datalogistudenter (alla bekanta med Javaprogrammering) och blev ombedda att lösa 10 problem i Java. Vissa problem blev presenterade med syntaxmarkering och vissa inte. Problemen var grundläggande problem som fokuserade på att hämta information från kod, vilket är en särskiljande faktor från tidigare studier inom samma område. Experimenten mättes i form av tid, antal korrekta svar och ögonrörelser. Resultaten visade, i snitt över alla problem och deltagare, att syntaxmarkerade problem hade en högre andel korrekta svar med en marginal på över 10%. Vidare löstes 7 av 10 problem snabbare i genomsnitt när de presenterades med syntaxmarkering, och enkäter visade att de flesta deltagare tyckte att problemen med syntaxmarkering var lättare att läsa. Däremot var resultaten mycket inkonsekventa beroende på vilket problem man observerar. I vissa exempel hade icke syntaxmarkerade problem en högre andel korrekta svar och bättre problemlösningstider. Ögonrörelsedatat gav inte mycket förklaring till resultaten, men visade i vissa fall att syntaxmarkering reducerade antalet fixeringar i komplexa kodsegment.
18
Bexell, Andreas. "Software Source Code Readability : A Mapping Study." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för programvaruteknik, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-20164.
Full textAbstract:
Background: Building software systems is an iterative and collaborative project, requiring developers not only to write code, but to maintain, expand, fix and enhance code already written. In order to do so, reading code is a central activity, and therefore it is important that code is written in a manner that makes it readable. Objectives: To map the state-of-the-art of software source code readability and find the definitions and methods to measure it, and provide an overview of the kinds of factors considered to impact software source code readability, and to compare this to practitioners' experiences of software source code readability. Methods: A systematic literature review of 76 studies in 72 papers from the last 40 years, explicitly concerning software source code readability, is compared with the results of five interviews with practitioners, of which three are case studies of commits explicitly targeting readability. Results: While individual factors' contribution towards readability is studied with some success, more general modelling studies often suffer from methodological problems, making them difficult to apply in practice or in studies of the correlation between software source code readability and other metrics. Conclusions: Key elements of the state-of-the-art have been implemented in practice, however, readability models are not used by the practitioners in this study. Several factors mentioned by practitioners are not considered by the studies included, and further qualitative study of software development practitioners may be needed.
19
Meckfessel, Michele Dawn. "Determinants and Consequences of Earnings Disclosure Readability." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/37364.
Full textAbstract:
This research examines whether changes in the regulatory environment (Plain English Guidelines, Reg. FD and SOX), management pessimism, and meeting/beating or missing analyst forecasts have had an impact on earnings disclosure readability over the 1997-2007 timeframe and whether firm managers are able to make negative firm financial information less transparent to the market by making negative earnings disclosures less readable. The idea that management may attempt to reduce the impact of bad news by making it more costly to analyze is not new. However, studying the qualitative aspects of the unaudited earnings disclosures is a unique setting and extends previous work on annual report readability. This study finds that the Plain English Guidelines, Reg. FD and SOX had differential impacts on earnings disclosure readability. Additionally, it finds that earnings disclosure readability decreases as firm earnings decrease. Moreover, this study demonstrates that institutional investors contribute to earnings disclosure readability and may serve as monitors of management in this regard. Finally, firms that beat analyst forecasts have more readable earnings disclosures. This study not only contributes to the body of academic literature, but also informs regulators regarding their ability to induce firm management to write more informative earnings disclosures.Ph. D.
20
Yedla, Nishitha. "An Eye Tracking Study Assessing Code Readability." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu149512047317961.
Full text
21
Forsyth, Jonathan Neil. "Automatic Readability Detection for Modern Standard Arabic." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2014. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3983.
Full textAbstract:
Research for automatic readability prediction of text has increased in the last decade and has shown that various machine learning methods can effectively address this problem. Many researchers have applied machine learning to readability prediction for English, while Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has received little attention. Here I describe a system which leverages machine learning to automatically predict the readability of MSA. I gathered a corpus comprising 179 documents that were annotated with the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) levels. Then, I extracted lexical and discourse features from each document. Finally, I applied the Tilburg Memory-Based Learning (TiMBL) machine learning system to read these features and predict the ILR level of each document using 10-fold cross validation for both 3-level and 5-level classification tasks and an 80/20 division for a 5-level classification task. I measured performance using the F-score. For 3-level and 5-level classifications my system achieved F-scores of 0.719 and 0.519 respectively. I discuss the implication of these results and the possibility of future development.
22
PIANTADOSI, VALENTINA. "On the evolution of the Code Readability." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi del Molise, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/11695/115331.
Full textAbstract:
La lettura del codice sorgente è un’attività eseguita molto spesso dagli sviluppatori: infatti, prima di effettuare anche la più semplice modifica, gli stessi devono leggere il codice sorgente, soprattutto se quest’ultimo è stato prodotto da altri. Diversi studi sono stati condotti per comprendere al meglio la leggibilità del codice. Tuttavia, tali studi sono stati effettuati per lo più su singoli frammenti di codice (statici), senza considerare la natura mutevole di un sistema software.
In uno studio preliminare, è stato osservato che le operazioni di refactoring eseguite dagli sviluppatori per migliorare diversi aspetti non funzionali di sistemi software open source spesso si traducono in una migliore leggibilità del codice. Motivati da tali risultati, nel presente lavoro di tesi, è stata studiata la leggibilità del codice nel contesto dell’evoluzione di un sistema software. In particolare, si è cercato di capire: (i) in che misura gli sviluppatori di software sono interessati alla leggibilità del codice durante le quotidiane attività di codifica; (ii) come la leggibilità del codice si evolve in sistemi software complessi; (iii) l’influenza delle caratteristiche personali degli sviluppatori sull’evoluzione della leggibilità del codice.
I risultati ottenuti hanno indicato, in primo luogo, che la maggioranza degli sviluppatori intervistati considerano la leggibilità un aspetto importante del codice sorgente. Inoltre, dall’analisi di diversi repository software si è osservato che la leggibilità cambia raramente durante l’evoluzione di un sistema software. Pertanto, i file creati illeggibili raramente diventano leggibili, e viceversa. Infine, è stato osservato che alcune caratteristiche personali, misurate attraverso specifiche metriche cognitive, hanno un impatto positivo sulla leggibilità del codice; nello specifico, sviluppatori che hanno un’elevata orienting network producono codice più leggibile.Code reading is an activity frequently performed by developers. Before modifying code, developers have to read it, especially if it was authored by others. Several studies have been carried out to find insights related to code readability. However, they were mostly conducted on single (static) code snippets, i.e., they did not take into account the ever-changing nature of software. In a preliminary study, we observe that refactoring operations performed by developers to improve several non-functional aspects of open-source software systems often result in improved code readability. Motivated by such results, in this thesis, we studied code readability in the context of software evolution. Especially, we aimed at understanding: (i) to what extent software developers are interested in code readability; (ii) how code readability evolves in complex software systems; (iii) the influence of developers' personal characteristics on the evolution of code readability. First, we observed that the large majority of the developers we surveyed reported that they consider readability as an important aspect of the source code. Then, by mining several software repositories we observed that readability rarely changes in software evolution. Therefore, files created unreadable rarely become readable, and vice versa. Finally, we noticed that some personal characteristics of developers have an impact on code readability. In particular, developers' orienting network (related to their attention) positively correlates with code readability.
23
Freiman, Kimberly. "A Readability Study of the White House Website." Thesis, Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för kommunikation och information, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-4767.
Full text
24
Chen, Mingda, and Yao He. "Exploration on Automated Software Requirement Document Readability Approaches." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för programvaruteknik, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-14816.
Full textAbstract:
Context. The requirements analysis phase, as the very beginning of software development process, has been identified as a quite important phase in the software development lifecycle. Software Requirement Specification (SRS) is the output of requirements analysis phase, whose quality factors play an important role in the evaluation work. Readability is a quite important SRS quality factor, but there are few available automated approaches for readability measurement, because of the tight dependency on readers' perceptions. Low readability of SRS documents has a serious impact on the whole process of software development. Therefore, it's extremely urgent to propose effective automated approaches for SRS documents readability measurement. Using traditional readability indexes to analyze readability of SRS documents automatically is a potentially feasible approach. However, the effectiveness of this approach is not systematically evaluated before. Objectives. In this study, firstly, we aim to understand the readability of texts and investigate approaches to score texts readability manually. Then investigate existing automated readability approaches for texts with their working theories. Next, evaluate the effectiveness of measuring the readability of SRS documents by using these automated readability approaches. Finally, rank these automated approaches by their effectiveness. Methods. In order to find out the way how human score the readability of texts manually and investigate existing automated readability approaches for texts, systematic literature review is chosen as the research methodology. Experiment is chosen to explore the effectiveness of automated readability approaches. Results. We find 67 articles after performing systematic literature review. According to systematic literature review, human judging the readability of texts through reading is the most common way of scoring texts readability manually. Additionally, we find four available automated readability assessments tools and seven available automated readability assessments formulas. After executing the experiment, we find the actual value of effectiveness of all selected approaches are not high and Coh-Metrix presents the highest actual value of effectiveness of automated readability approach among the selected approaches. Conclusions. Coh-Metrix is the most effective automated readability approach, but the feasibility in directly applying Coh-Metrix in SRS documents readability assessments cannot be permitted. Since the actual value of evaluated effectiveness is not high enough. In addition, all selected approaches are based on metrics of readability measures, but no semantic factors are blended in readability assessments. Hence studying more on human perception quantifying and adding semantic analysis in SRS documents readability assessment could be two research directions in future.
25
Guo, Yi. "Evaluation of Readability of displays in Bright Surroundings." Thesis, KTH, Signalbehandling, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-160946.
Full textAbstract:
With the wide spread of wireless technology, many devices, such as tablets, smartphones, notebooks, fixed and portable navigation systems are becoming immensely convenient to access and are making a significant contribution to our daily life. Compared to conventional PC, portable devices are used at different times of the day and in various conditions and environments, both indoors and outdoors. As a consequence, devices need to be adaptive and adaptable to a wide range of use contexts and conditions. It is often argued that contextual factors, such as the ambient illuminance in relation to characteristics of the display (e.g., surface treatment, size, screen reflectance, and display luminance) may have a strong influence on the use of such devices and corresponding user experiences. Yet, the current understanding of these influence factors is still rather limited. Therefore, in this thesis work, emphasis is given particularly to the impact of lighting on readability, visual performance and affective state. As a first step, a preparatory investigation focusing on the objective measure- ment of display luminance and contrast, display gloss, and luminance in different scenes, took place. For this first step, a large number of tablet and laptop dis- plays were evaluated. This preparatory investigation served as a complement to and as an input for step two, namely a subjective study with human test subjects which was organized in a controlled lab environment. In the subjective test (N=18), different types of displays, luminance settings and lighting conditions were included to investigate the impact on display read- ability. The results of subjective tests indicate that for matte, visual acuity and reading speed is both impaired by the increase of ambient light luminance. However, they are compensated effectively by the increase of display luminance when it is below 500-600 cd/ m2. Compared with matte display, the glossy dis- play shows to be more robust in relation to the ambient light, though it indeed has a negative effect on visual acuity and reading speed. However, for subjective feelings, there is no significant difference between the two displays. Both of them are influenced by the ambient light only. In the post-experiment evaluation of the preference of displays, the majority (61%) of the test subjects indicated a preference for the glossy display.I och med spridningen av tradlos teknologi, blir enheter sasom surfplattor, smarta mobiler och GPS:er alltmer anvandbara och blir darmed en allt viktigare del av var vardag. Jamfort med en vanlig dator, anvands dessa barbara enheter i manga olika sammanhang i olika miljoer, bade inomhus och utomhus. Darfor maste de kunna anpassa sig till olika miljoer och forutsattningar. Det pastas ofta att omgivande faktorer sasom bakgrundsbelysning och hur dessa samverkar med skarmens egenskaper (yta, storlek, reflektans och ljusstyrka) kan han en viktig inverkan pa anvandningen av sadana enheter och motsvarande anvan- darupplevelse. Trots det ar var forstaelse av dessa faktorer fortfarande ratt begransad. Darfor fokuserar detta examensarbete specifikt pa hur lasbarhet, lasupplevelse och humor paverkas av ljusforhallandena. Som ett forsta steg, gjordes en forberedande studie med objektiva matningar av displayers ljusstyrka, kontrast och matthet i olika omgivningar. I detta forsta steg, utvarderades ett stort antal olika lasplattor och laptop-skarmar. Denna in- ledande undersokning bildade ett komplement och underlag till det andra steget, vilket var en subjektiv anvandbarhetsstudie med ett antal forsokspersoner, or- ganiserad i en reglerad labbmiljo. I anvandartesten (N=18), undersoktes lasbarheten for olika typer av dis- player under olika ljusstyrkeinstallningar och omgivande ljusforhallanden. Re- sultaten av anvandartesten indikerar att for matta displayer, paverkas skarpa och lashastighet negativt da den omgivande ljusstyrka okar. Detta kan dock effektivt kompenseras genom att oka displayens ljusstyrka, da den ar under 500-600 cd/m2. I jamforelse med matta displayer, visar sig blanka displayer vara mer robusta mot variationer i bakgrundsbelysningen. Daremot, for sub- jektiva kanslan, ar det ingen signifikant skillnad mellan de tva displaytyperna. I bada fallen ar det bara omgivande belysningen som paverkar. I en utvardering efter avslutat experiment, foredrog en majoritet (61%) av forsokspersonerna den blanka displayen.
26
Brodbeck, William Joseph. "The Effect of Readability on Simple Linear Regression." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1591867761661656.
Full text
27
Johansson, Lucas. "Improving asset readability in top-down VR games." Thesis, Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för konst, kommunikation och lärande, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-63864.
Full textAbstract:
With this work I wanted to examine how to improve readability of battlefields in top-down gamesfor VR by increasing the visual distinction between units. I analyzed three successful PC gameswithin the genre and created three different user tests to come up with my results and conclusions.The results from my VR test is compared to my non-VR tests to see what one has to do to reachthe same level of readability or better in VR. It turns out you need to put more time in to yourassets for improving readability in VR than without VR on a non-stereo display.
28
Zammit, Vincent. "On the readability of machine checkable formal proofs." Thesis, University of Kent, 1999. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/21861/.
Full textAbstract:
It is possible to implement mathematical proofs in a machine-readable language. Indeed, certain proofs, especially those deriving properties of safety-critical systems, are often required to be checked by machine in order to avoid human errors. However, machine checkable proofs are very hard to follow by a human reader. Because of their unreadability, such proofs are hard to implement, and more difficult still to maintain and modify. In this thesis we study the possibility of implementing machine checkable proofs in a more readable format. We design a declarative proof language, SPL, which is based on the Mizar language. We also implement a proof checker for SPL which derives theorems in the HOL system from SPL proof scripts. The language and its proof checker are extensible, in the sense that the user can modify and extend the syntax of the language and the deductive power of the proof checker during the mechanisation of a theory. A deductive database of trivial knowledge is used by the proof checker to derive facts which are considered trivial by the developer of mechanised theories so that the proofs of such facts can be omitted. We also introduce the notion of structured straightforward justifications, in which simple facts, or conclusions, are justified by a number of premises together with a number of inferences which are used in deriving the conclusion from the given premises. A tableau prover for first-order logic with equality is implemented as a HOL derived rule and used during the proof checking of SPL scripts. The work presented in this thesis also includes a case study involving the mechanisation of a number of results in group theory in SPL, in which the deductive power of the SPL proof checker is extended throughout the development of the theory.
29
Nyqvist, Anna, and Joar Rutqvist. "The Impact of Colour Themes on Code Readability." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-255046.
Full textAbstract:
The ability to read code is an important skill in programming, and is said to be affected by the coding environment and interface. This thesis investigates the impact of colour themes on code readability, comparing dark text on a light background to light text on a dark background. An experiment was performed where participants solved code comprehension tasks while recorded using eye tracking. Results indicated no significant differences in accuracy or time between the two colour themes. Similarly, the eye tracker recordings showed no significant difference in eye movement patterns between colour themes.Läsning av källkod är en viktig färdighet inom programmering och sägs påverkas av programmeringsmiljöns gränssnitt. Denna uppsats undersöker färgtemans effekt på kodläsbarhet, genom en jämförelse mellan mörk text på ljus bakgrund och ljus text på mörk bakgrund. Ett experiment genomfördes där deltagare studerades med blickspårning då de löste kodläsningsuppgifter. Resultaten visade inga signifikanta skillnader i andel korrekta svar eller lösningstid mellan färgteman. Blickspårningsdatan indikerade inte heller någon signifikant skillnad mellan färgteman.
30
SCALABRINO, Simone. "Automatically assessing and improving code readability and understandability." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi del Molise, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11695/90885.
Full textAbstract:
Leggere e comprendere codice sorgente è un requisito intrinseco di molte attività legate alla ma-nutenzione e all’evoluzione di sistemi software. Gli sviluppatori devono leggere e comprendere il codice esistente prima di poter iniziare a lavorare a uno specifico compito. Senza una conoscenza completa del codice sorgente, infatti, gli sviluppatori non sarebbero in grado correggere errori o aggiungere nuove funzionalità. Stimare automaticamente la leggibilità e la comprensibilità del codice sorgente potrebbe aiutare a prevedere lo sforzo richiesto per modificare specifiche com-ponenti di un sistema. Inoltre, una metrica in grado di misurare oggettivamente tali aspetti po-trebbe essere importante per migliorare la qualità dei test generati automaticamente.
In questa testi si prova a migliorare l’accuratezza dei modelli di leggibilità già esistenti in lettera-tura, introducendo nuove metriche in grado di misurare aspetti testuali del codice. Si prova, poi, ad andare oltre la leggibilità, sperimentando l’efficacia di un gran numero di metriche nella valu-tazione automatica della comprensibilità del codice. I risultati mostrano che non è ancora possibi-le stimare automaticamente la comprensibilità del codice sorgente. Nel contesto del software te-sting si introduce una nuova metrica, chiamata “Coverage Entropy”, che mira a stimare la com-prensibilità dei casi di test. Si è integrata la Coverage Entropy nel processo di generazione auto-matica di casi di test al fine di migliorarne la comprensibilità; si è, quindi, definito un nuovo ap-proccio, chiamato TERMite. I risultati mostrano che TERMite genera un minor numero di casi di test “eager” rispetto allo stato dell’arte e che riesce a migliorare anche altri aspetti di qualità, co-me la coesione dei test.Reading and understanding code is an inherent requirement for many maintenance and evolution tasks. Developers continuously read the code and they make an effort to understand it before being able to perform any task. Without a thorough understanding of source code, developers would not be able to fix bugs or add new features timely. Automatically assessing code readabi-lity and understandability can help in estimating the effort required to modify code components. Besides, having an objective metric for such aspects could be important to improve the quality of automatically generated test cases. In this thesis, we improve the accuracy of existing readability models by introducing textual fea-tures. Besides, we try to go further, and we use a large number of new and state-of-the-art me-trics to automatically assess code understandability. However, our results show that it is still not possible to automatically assess the understandability of source code. In the context of software testing, we introduce a new metric, namely Coverage Entropy, which is aimed at estimating the understandability of a test case. We use Coverage Entropy in TERMite, a novel test case genera-tion technique aimed at improving the understandability of generated tests. Our results show that TERMite generates a lower number of eager tests compared to the state-of-the-art and it
31
Weisenmiller, Eric Michael. "A Study of the Readability of On-Screen Type." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/29400.
Full textAbstract:
This study examined the readability of fonts. More specifically, it investigated how four different fonts effected both reading rate and reading comprehension. The typefaces Georgia, Verdana, (which, according to their designers, optimize onscreen readability) Times, and Arial (both designed for digital output to hard copy) were displayed as treatments both on a computer screen and on paper. The purpose of the study was to determine whether sans serif and serif typefaces optimized for on-screen viewing significantly improve reading rate and reading comprehension. Comparisons were made among the typefaces using a categorical independent variable postmeasure-only research design to determine the level of dependent variables (rate, comprehension). The group means of each of twelve treatment groups (N=264) were analyzed using analyses of variance to determine if either of the variables (presentation mode or font) had a statistically significant effect upon reading rate and/or reading comprehension of a sample taken from a population of subjects attending a midwestern state university. No significant difference was found among reading speed or reading comprehension scores of subjects tested who read text which was typeset in any of the four typefaces. However, significant difference was found between the presentation modes used in the experiment.
Since it was found that 8-bit on-screen text was not significanly more readable than 600dpi text on paper, and 1-bit onscreen text was found to be significantly less readable than onscreen text and 600dpi text on paper, this research concludes that for purposes of ease of readability, onscreen text is better suited to be rendered as 8-bit onscreen text than 1-bit on-screen text. Also, the findings indicate that 8-bit on-screen text was not found to be significantly less readable than 600dpi text on paper. Also, due to the various typefaces currently being used in digital typography and the differing presentation media, further exploration of the readability of on-screen text should examine more fonts and screen display variables.Ph. D.
32
Instone, Elizabeth A. "THE VARIANCE AMONGST THE RESULTS OF READABILITY FORMULAS REGARDING U.S. HISTORY TEXTBOOKS." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1300739565.
Full text
33
Chiappetti, Charles F. "Evaluation of the Haworth-Newman avionics display readability scale." Thesis, Monterey, Calif. : Springfield, Va. : Naval Postgraduate School ; Available from National Technical Information Service, 1994. http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA286127.
Full text
34
Hasegawa, Satoshi, Kazuhiro Fujikake, Masako Omori, Masaru Miyao, and 克. 宮尾. "Readability of Characters on Mobile Phone Liquid Crystal Displays." Ablex Publishing Corporation, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/11136.
Full text
35
Matsubara, Shigeki, Tomohiro Ohno, and Masaki Murata. "Automatic Linefeed Insertion for Improving Readability of Lecture Transcript." Springer, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/15115.
Full text
36
Laine, M. Kristiina. "Cloze analysis of financial reports readability : a multilingual comparison." Thesis, Bangor University, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.318944.
Full text
37
Xia, Menglin. "Text readability and summarisation for non-native reading comprehension." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288740.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on two important aspects of non-native reading comprehension: text readability assessment, which estimates the reading difficulty of a given text for L2 learners, and learner summarisation assessment, which evaluates the quality of learner summaries to assess their reading comprehension. We approach both tasks as supervised machine learning problems and present automated assessment systems that achieve state-of-the-art performance. We first address the task of text readability assessment for L2 learners. One of the major challenges for a data-driven approach to text readability assessment is the lack of significantly-sized level-annotated data aimed at L2 learners. We present a dataset of CEFR-graded texts tailored for L2 learners and look into a range of linguistic features affecting text readability. We compare the text readability measures for native and L2 learners and explore methods that make use of the more plentiful data aimed at native readers to help improve L2 readability assessment. We then present a summarisation task for evaluating non-native reading comprehension and demonstrate an automated summarisation assessment system aimed at evaluating the quality of learner summaries. We propose three novel machine learning approaches to assessing learner summaries. In the first approach, we examine using several NLP techniques to extract features to measure the content similarity between the reading passage and the summary. In the second approach, we calculate a similarity matrix and apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to assess the summary quality using the similarity matrix. In the third approach, we build an end-to-end summarisation assessment model using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Further, we combine the three approaches to a single system using a parallel ensemble modelling technique. We show that our models outperform traditional approaches that rely on exact word match on the task and that our best model produces quality assessments close to professional examiners.
38
Kauchak, David, and Gondy Leroy. "Moving Beyond Readability Metrics for Health-Related Text Simplification." IEEE COMPUTER SOC, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/621254.
Full textAbstract:
Limited health literacy is a barrier to understanding health information. Simplifying text can reduce this barrier and possibly other known disparities in health. Unfortunately, few tools exist to simplify text with demonstrated impact on comprehension. By leveraging modern data sources integrated with natural language processing algorithms, we are developing the first semi-automated text simplification tool. We present two main contributions. First, we introduce our evidence-based development strategy for designing effective text simplification software and summarize initial, promising results. Second, we present a new study examining existing readability formulas, which are the most commonly used tools for text simplification in healthcare. We compare syllable count, the proxy for word difficulty used by most readability formulas, with our new metric ‘term familiarity’ and find that syllable count measures how difficult words ‘appear’ to be, but not their actual difficulty. In contrast, term familiarity can be used to measure actual difficulty.
39
Telles, Samantha Valentim. "Readability and understandability of notes to the financial statements." Universidade de São Paulo, 2018. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12136/tde-30072018-105221/.
Full textAbstract:
Accounting as a tool for communicating relevant information to multiple users must overcome issues and barriers of presenting such information. One of the issues is its understandability, once lack of understanding can impact decisions. However, understandability is not easily measured. Previous studies use readability metrics as proxies for understandability. They understand that these concepts are related to some extent, but while readability focuses on the text, understandability includes the reader characteristics. Thus, the main purpose of this research was to verify how readability impacts the understandability of the information from the notes to the financial statements. I also verified whether the distance between them was due to reporting language. The specific goals were: (i) to verify whether different readability levels have impact on the notes to the financial statements\' understandability; (ii) to verify whether the understandability levels are due to accounting specific terms; (iii) to verify if those notes\' understandability and readability are different for different languages; and (iv) to verify if the levels of readability and understandability changed after OCPC 07. I performed two different types of research methods, archival and experimental research. The archival research applied mean tests to 44 firms that presented their notes both in Portuguese and in English from 2012 to 2015. I studied the notes of Financial Instruments and Provisions. I used indexes of intelligibility as proxies to understandability, calculated by a linguistic software. I found that, for most indexes where firms had worse levels of readability, they showed better levels of intelligibility, which goes against the expected. My results also show that with few exceptions, the readability and intelligibility indexes are different for Portuguese and English. Moreover, I found that there was no change after the adoption of OCPC 07 on both readability and intelligibility indexes. In the experimental research, I applied a self-created instrument based on the MIT test to 112 students in Brazil of graduate and undergraduate courses related to business, to verify how readability impacts on understandability, by manipulating readability components of the Flesch index (number of words per sentence and number of syllables per word). I controlled for some characteristics of each participant and the technicality of accounting language. I used an ANCOVA to test the difference between treatments and a Mediation Analysis to verify the impact of the glossary. I found no difference in understanding through different levels of readability, while some participant\'s characteristics - such as previous understanding skills, level of education, courses and the type of school - showed relevance in explaining understandability. The evidence also suggests that using a glossary to assist the reader affected understandability, but mostly for those who have less prior knowledge regarding notes to the financial statements. These results allow me to conclude readability metrics are not good proxies to measure understandability in Accounting, glossary assists on reader\'s understandability, language has an impact over readability and understandability, and readability and understandability did not change with the OCPC 07.A Contabilidade como ferramenta para comunicar informação relevante a múltiplos usuários, deve superar problemas e barreiras na apresentação dessa informação. Um dos problemas é sua compreensibilidade, dado que a falta de compreensão pode impactar as decisões. Contudo, compreensibilidade não é mensurada facilmente. Estudos anteriores usam métricas de legibilidade como proxies de compreensibilidade. Eles entendem que esses conceitos estão relacionados em certa medida, mas enquanto legibilidade foca no texto, compreensibilidade inclui características do leitor. Assim, o objetivo principal dessa pesquisa foi verificar como a legibilidade impacta na compreensibilidade das informações das Notas Explicativas. Foi verificado também se a distância entre elas se deve à língua do relatório. Os objetivos específicos eram: (i) verificar se diferentes níveis de legibilidade impactam a compreensibilidade das notas explicativas; (ii) verificar se os níveis de compreensibilidade dependem de termos específicos contábeis; (iii) verificar se a compreensibilidade e a legibilidade das notas são diferente em diferentes línguas; e (iv) verificar se a compreensibilidade e a legibilidade das notas mudaram depois da OCPC 07. Realizaram-se dois métodos de pesquisas diferentes, um de arquivo e outro experimental. A pesquisa de arquivo aplicou testes de média em 44 empresas abertas que apresentaram suas notas em português e em inglês de 2012 a 2015. Foram estudadas notas de Instrumentos Financeiros e Provisões. Utilizaram-se índices de inteligibilidade como proxies para compreensibilidade, calculados por um software linguístico. Os resultados mostram que a maior parte das empresas que possuíam os piores níveis de legibilidade, apresentaram os melhores níveis de inteligibilidade, o que é contrário ao esperado. Os resultados também mostram que, com algumas exceções, os índices de legibilidade e compreensibilidade são diferentes em português e inglês. Ademais, descobriu-se que não houve mudança após a adoção da OCPC 07 em ambos os índices de legibilidade e compreensibilidade. No experimento, foi aplicado um instrumento criado pela autora, baseado no teste MIT, a 112 estudantes no Brasil de cursos relacionados a negócios de graduação e pós-graduação, para verificar como a legibilidade impacta na compreensibilidade, manipulando os componentes de legibilidade do índice Flesch (número de palavras por frase e número de sílabas por palavra). Controlou-se algumas características de cada participante e pela tecnicidade da linguagem contábil. Usou-se a ANCOVA para testar a diferença entre tratamentos e a Análise de Mediação para verificar o impacto de um glossário. Não foram encontradas diferenças de compreensão entre os diferentes níveis de legibilidade, enquanto que algumas características dos participantes - como habilidades de compreensão prévias, nível educacional, curso e tipo de universidade - se mostraram relevantes para explicar compreensibilidade. Os resultados também sugerem que o uso de um glossário para ajudar o leitor afetou compreensibilidade, mas mais para aqueles que possuíam menor conhecimento prévio sobre Notas Explicativas. Os resultados permitem concluir que as métricas de legibilidade não são boas proxies para mensurar compreensibilidade em Contabilidade, o glossário auxilia na compreensibilidade do leitor, a língua impacta legibilidade e compreensibilidade e legibilidade e compreensibilidade não mudaram com a OCPC 07.
40
Schneider, Michael. "Analysis of Features Composing an Automated Text Readability Formula." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/63.
Full textAbstract:
In an effort to make reading more accessible, an automated readability formula can help pair readers with material appropriate for their reading level. This study attempts to discover and analyze a set of possible features that may be included in a future automated readability formula. This set is not a definitive list of readability formula features, but rather an overview of current features being study in the Natural Language Processing field.
41
Wang, Hao Xing. "Developing and testing readability measurements for second language learners." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2016. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/95111/5/Haoxing_Wang_Thesis.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
This research constructed a readability measurement for French speakers who view English as a second language. It identified the true cognates, which are the similar words from these two languages, as an indicator of the difficulty of an English text for French people. A multilingual lexical resource is used to detect true cognates in text, and Statistical Language Modelling to predict the predict the readability level.
The proposed enhanced statistical language model is making a step in the right direction by improving the accuracy of readability predictions for French speakers by up to 10% compared to state of the art approaches. The outcome of this study could accelerate the learning process for French speakers who are studying English. More importantly, this study also benefits the readability estimation research community, presenting an approach and evaluation at sentence level as well as innovating with the use of cognates as a new text feature.
42
Tysell, Sundkvist Leif, and Emil Persson. "Code Styling and its Effects on Code Readability and Interpretation." Thesis, KTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC), 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-209576.
Full textAbstract:
Code readability has a considerable effect upon the life-cycle of software products. It is important that the code is maintainable, reusable and that it is easy for a programmer to get acquainted with unfamiliar code. Previous studies have been used to show correlations between code readability and code styling. Eye tracking technology has also been used in order to study the movements of the eye and the focus of a subject in a computer gener- ated environment. By using a combination of Eye tracking technology and code styling features such as syntax highlighting, logical variable- and func- tion names, code indentation and code commenting the correlations between code readability and code styling has been further addressed and examined. This thesis studies subjects that have participated in a series of experiments in which they have been given the assignments of examining code whilst their eye movements have been tracked using Eye tracking tools and software. The tracked data was assembled into heatmap-based images plotting movement of the eye on screen. The experiments showed that there is indeed correla- tions between how code styling is used and how the participants addressed the given assignments. The conclusion of this report is that the readability and interpretation of code was improved by the introduction of certain code styling features. As for code indentation and syntax highlighting, no visible improvement was observed. Code commenting, however, caused the subjects to examine the method sig- natures in a code more thoroughly and thus detecting return-type-related errors hidden within; a visible improvement. Furthermore, logical variable naming rids the programmer of the trouble of having to read entire pieces of code that could otherwise, when used cleverly, be explained by a method or variable name itself, and thus improved readability and interpretation as well.Kods läsbarhet har en betydande effekt på en produkts livscykel. Det är viktigt att en kod är lätt att underhålla, återanvända och att det är smidigt för en programmerare att bekanta sig med främmande kod. Tidigare studier har använts för att visa korrelationer mellan kods läsbarhet och kodstilisering. Eye tracking-teknologi har också använts f ̈or att kunna studera ögonrörelser och fokus hos personer i en datorgenererad miljö. Med hjälp av en kombination of Eye tracking-teknologi och kodstiliseringsverktyg såsom syntax highlighting, logiska variabel- och funktionsnamn, kodindrag samt kommenterad kod har korrelationen mellan kods la ̈sbarhet och kodstilisering ytterligare kunnat angripas och studeras. Denna rapport studerar ett antal testpersoner som har deltagit i en serie av experiment i vilka de tillordnats problem som involverar tolkning av kod samtidigt som deras ögonrörelser studerats med hjälp av Eye tracking-utrustning- och mjukvara. Datat från experimenten har sedan sammanfattats med Heatmap-baserade bilder som plottar o ̈gats ro ̈relser p ̊a skärmen. Experimenten visade att det finns korrelationer mellan hur kodstilisering används och hur deltagarna valde att angripa och lösa de givna problemen. Slutsatsen av denna rapport är att kods läsbarhet förbättrades i och med introduktionen av kodstiliseringsfunktioner. Vad gäller indenterad kod samt syntax highlighting observerades inga synliga förbättringar. Kommenterad kod, å andra sidan, medförde att testpersonerna undersökte metodsdignaturerna i kod mer noggrannt vilket ledde till att de också upptäckte return- type-relaterade fel i koden; en synlig förbättring. Dessutom visade det sig att logiska variabelnamn medför att programmeraren ej behöver ödsla tid eller energi för att läsa igenom hela kodstycken som i själva verket kunde ha förklarats av ett klyftigt utvalt metod- eller variabelnamn, vilket också innebar en förbättring för läsbarheten för kod.
43
Brown, Christine Mary. "Assessing the Readability of Māori Language Texts for Classroom Use." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Māori and Indigenous Studies, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/4015.
Full textAbstract:
This project sought to find a rigorous and manageable method for measuring the difficulty of texts in te reo Māori written for children, beyond junior reading material in Māori-medium educational settings.
The project examined a range of readability measures based on semantic and/or syntactic features of text, following the work of Warwick Elley (1969) and Richard Benton et al. (1995). Features such as the difficulty of content words, average sentence length, standardised type:token ratios and the use of function words were used in different combinations to create seven methods to measure text difficulty.
Teachers’ and students’ ratings of text difficulty, and students’ scores on reading comprehension tasks related to the texts were used as criteria to examine the validity of the readability methods. The findings revealed that indices of either vocabulary load or lexical density when used in combination with the number of function types in the text, produce statistical significance with the criterion measures. Further research is needed to confirm their validity for use in Māori –medium classroom settings.
The Māori word lists developed for this project as the basis of the readability approaches have the potential for more widespread analyses of language proficiency measures for students in Māori-medium settings.
44
Rjiba, Hatem. "Essays on the determinants and implications of annual report readability." Thesis, Paris Est, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017PESC0124.
Full textAbstract:
Cette thèse comprend trois essais dont l’objectif est d’étudier les déterminants et les implications de la qualité de l’information narrative des entreprises cotées. L’originalité de ce travail par rapport aux études antérieures réside dans le fait que nous nous intéressons à la dimension qualitative de l’information divulguée. Afin d’appréhender la qualité de cette information nous recourons à des techniques de traitement automatique de langage naturel qui permettent de construire des indices de lisibilité des rapports annuels.Le premier essai étudie l'effet de la complexité textuelle des rapports annuels sur la liquidité des titres. L’utilisation d’un échantillon d’entreprises françaises cotées en bourse sur la période 2002-2013 montre l’existence d’une relation positive entre le degré de lisibilité des rapports annuels et la liquidité des titres. Ces résultats suggèrent que la complexité textuelle de l’information narrative affecte les investisseurs sur le marché des actions.Le deuxième essai étudie l’effet de la lisibilité des rapports annuels sur le coût des fonds propres des entreprises. Nous menons notre étude empirique sur un échantillon d’entreprises américaines cotées en bourse sur la période 1995-2012. Les résultats montrent que les entreprises font face à un coût de financement plus élevé lorsque leurs rapports annuels sont moins lisibles, ce qui indique qu’un degré faible de lisibilité réduit la capacité des investisseurs à prévoir les performances futures de l’entreprise et leur amène par conséquence à demander un rendement de fonds propres plus élevé.Le troisième essai examine l’effet des pratiques de réduction d’impôt des entreprises sur la lisibilité de leurs divulgations financières. La littérature mobilisant la théorie d’agence montre que ces pratiques de réduction d’impôt créent un cadre permettant aux dirigeants d’extraire des bénéfices privés aux dépens des autres parties prenantes. Afin de s’assurer que leurs actions opportunistes ne soient détectées, les dirigeants réduisent la qualité de l’information divulguée, ce qui détériore l’environnent informationnel de l’entreprise en question. En utilisant un échantillon d’entreprises américaines cotées en bourse pour la période 1995-2012, nous constatons que les entreprises qui s’engagent dans des politiques de diminution d’impôt publient des rapports annuels moins lisibles et plus ambigus.Mot Clés: Information narrative; lisibilité des rapports annuels; Risque d’information ; Liquidité; Coût des fonds propres; Optimisation fiscaleThis thesis comprises three separate but interconnected essays that focus on the determinants and economic implications of corporate narrative disclosure. The first essay examines the effect of annual report textual complexity on firms’ stock liquidity. Using techniques from computational linguistics, we predict and find that less readable filings are associated with lower stock liquidity. Our study provides evidence that difficult-to-read annual reports can act as a non-trivial impediment to investors’ ability to process information into useful trading signals. The findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests, including endogeneity, use of alternative regression techniques, and use of alternative liquidity and readability proxies.Using a large panel of U.S. public firms, the second essay presents the first evidence highlighting the relation between annual report readability and cost of equity capital. We hypothesize that complex textual reporting deters investors’ ability to process and interpret annual reports, leading to higher information risk, and thus higher cost of equity financing. Consistent with our prediction, we find that greater textual complexity is associated with higher cost of equity capital. Our results are statistically significant and economically important. We also show that disclosure tone exerts a non-trivial bearing on the cost of equity. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, including use of multiple estimation methods, alternative proxies of annual report readability and cost of equity capital measures, and potential endogeneity concerns. Overall, our study contributes to the research examining the relation between disclosure quality and cost of capital.The third essay investigates the effect of firms’ tax avoidance practices on the textual properties of their annual filings. Using a large sample of U.S.-listed firms, we document a positive and statistically significant relation between corporate tax avoidance and annual report textual complexity. In addition, we show that managers of tax-avoiding firms tend to hide their avoidance behavior in more ambiguous language. Our results prove to be robust to the use of numerous alternative proxies of corporate tax avoidance and annual report readability. The findings are also robust to a number of checks, including, using additional control variables, employing alternative regression methodologies, and addressing endogeneity concerns.Keywords: Narrative disclosure; Annual report readability; Disclosure tone; Information risk Stock liquidity; Cost of equity capital; Corporate tax avoidance
45
Liao, Xuan, and Linyao Jiang. "The Role of Duplicated Code in Software Readability and Comprehension." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Institutionen för programvaruteknik, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-20621.
Full textAbstract:
Background. Readability and comprehension are the critical points of software developmentand maintenance. There are many researcher point out that the duplicatecode as a code smell has effect on software maintainability, but lack of research abouthow duplicate code affect software readability and comprehension, which are parts of maintainability. Objectives. In this thesis, we aim to briefly summarize the impact of duplicatecode and typical types of duplicate code according to current works, then our goalis to explore whether duplicate code is a factor to influence readability and comprehension. Methods. In our present research, we did a background survey to asked some background questions from forty-two subjects to help us classify them, and conduct an experiment with subjects to explore the role of duplicate code on perceived readability and comprehension by experiment. The perceived readability and comprehension are measured by perceived readability scale, reading time and the accuracy of cloze test. Results. The experimental data shows code with duplication have higher perceived readability and better comprehension, however, the difference are not significant.And code with duplication cost less reading time than code without duplication,and the difference is significant. But duplication type are strongly associate with perceived readability. For reading time, it is significant associate with duplication type and size of code. While there do not exists significant correlation between programmingexperience of subjects and perceived readability or comprehension, andit also has no significant relation between perceived readability and comprehension,size and CC according to our data results. Conclusions. Code with duplication has higher software readability according tothe results of reading time, which is significant. And code with duplication has highercomprehension than code without duplication, but the difference is not statistically significant according to our experimental results. Longer size of code will increasereading time, and different duplication type also influence the perceived readability,the three duplication types we discussed show these relationship obviously.
46
Bangor, Aaron W. "Improving Access to Computer Displays: Readability for Visually Impaired Users." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/36939.
Full textAbstract:
In the field of human factors engineering the issue of how to present electronic text to people has been studied intensely for over 35 years. However, one major consideration that has largely been overlooked in these studies is how visual impairments affect reading of computer text. Specifically, the issue of how text can be modified to improve readability of CRTs for individuals with low vision. A 2x5x2x3 (visual capability, font size, polarity, and contrast) mixed-factor, repeated-measures experimental design was used to determine if changes in font size, contrast polarity, and/or contrast can improve reading speeds and reduce error rate for people with low vision.
The results of this experiment show that alterations in text can be made that do not affect unimpaired vision readers while dramatically improving the reading capabilities of the impaired vision population. For character size, 12 and 14 point font sizes were found to be too small for the visually impaired population examined. In general, 18 and 30 point font sizes were equal to each other and to the 24 point font size, but for some interactions these two were found to produce longer response times and higher error rates. Thus, a 24 point font size is recommended.
Unlike previous research with visually impaired participants, this experiment found that negative (white-on-black) polarity worsened reading performance. It is thought that this discrepancy is a result of polarity's interaction with small font sizes. For this reason, it is recommended that for font sizes of 18 points and below, positive polarity should be used. For 24 and 30 point sizes either polarity is satisfactory, though previous research (Legge, Pelli, Rubin, and Schleske, 1985b; NRC, 1995; Rubin and Legge, 1989) suggests negative polarity might be better for some visually impaired readers..
Contrasts of 3:1, 7:1, and 18:1 were used in this experiment and had no significant effect for either vision group. However, contrast did significantly interact with both font size and polarity. For font sizes of 18 points or below, it is recommended that contrasts of 18:1 be used for either polarity, but this is very important if negative polarity is used.
The above recommendations are based on a small group of impaired vision readers. Visual impairments vary widely and the sample used in this experiment represented only a portion of them, with respect to both cause and severity. Wherever possible, computer text should be tailored to the unique needs of its users.
Master of Science
47
Regin, Måns, and Gunnarsson Emil. "Refactoring Existing Database Layers for Improved Performance, Readability and Simplicity." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för datavetenskap och medieteknik (DM), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-105277.
Full textAbstract:
Since the late 90s, support and services at SAAB have produced and maintained a product called ELDIS. ELDIS is an application used by Swedish armed forces at air bases in Sweden and flight technicians at air bases. It displays electrical information, wire diagrams, and detailed information for cables, electrical equipment, and other electrical devices. The main problem for ELDIS is that when drawing wire diagrams in the application, it takes too long of a time when the stored procedures are retrieving information from the database. There are two significant areas in this project, analyzing and optimizing stored procedures and implementing a client-side solution. This project aims to guide SAAB to choose the right approach for solving the performance issue of the application and display some of the problems that can exist with slow stored procedures for companies in general. This project has optimized the most used stored procedure at SAAB and compared it to a client-side solution and the original application. The result of this project is that both the optimized stored procedure implementation and the client-side implementation is a faster option than the original implementation. It also highlights that when trying to optimize the stored procedures, indexing on the database should be considered for increasing the performance of a stored procedure.
48
Murry, David D. "Reading ability vs. readability in a sex offender treatment program." Online version, 1999. http://www.uwstout.edu/lib/thesis/1999/1999murryd.pdf.
Full text
49
Meier, Lori T., and Karin Keith. "We the People: Elementary Pre-Service Teachers and Constitutional Readability." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/1022.
Full textAbstract:
This study explores the reading difficulty level of the Constitution for pre-service elementary teachers in a large, public university in the southeastern United States. For our purposes, the difficulty level of the Constitution for the target readers was determined through administration of a cloze measure based on Article 2, Section 1.
50
Meier, Lori T., Karin Keith, and Edward J. Dwyer. "We the People: Elementary Pre-Service Teachers and Constitutional Readability." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/981.
Full textAbstract:
In light of increasing mandates to incorporate close reading of primary source historical documents at the elementary level, this study explored the reading difficulty level of the US Constitution with preservice elementary teachers using a traditional cloze assessment procedure. While best practice pedagogy of social studies has long included thoughtful reading of primary sources, new language arts guidelines situate the analysis of primary documents within formulaic quantifiable frameworks, often problematic to the pre-service teacher. With implications for reading and social studies, this paper explores several relevant issues to both pre-service teachers and the elementary classrooms they will teach in.