The Readability of Principles of Macroeconomics Textbooks

Abstract

The authors evaluated principles of macroeconomics textbooks for readability using Coh-Metrix, a computational linguistics tool. Additionally, they conducted an experiment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Web site in which participants ranked the readability of text samples. There was a wide range of scores on readability indexes both among textbooks and within textbooks. Results from the Mechanical Turk experiment revealed that the Flesch Reading Ease Index does not predict which samples readers will prefer, but readers do prefer samples that are thematically similar, as identified by Latent Semantic Analysis. There were differences in the responses of native and non-native-but-proficient English speakers to the text samples, suggesting that the intended audience is an important determinant of readability.

Keywords:

• Coh-Metrix
• economics textbooks
• Mechanical Turk
• readability

Keywords:

• JEL codes A2
• A20
• A21

Notes

1. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score = (.39 × ASL) + (11.8 × ASW) − 15.59, where ASL = number of words/number of sentences and ASW = number of syllables/number of words.

2. Flesch originally postulated the Flesch Reading Ease Score scaled between 0 and 100 with higher numbers indicating a greater degree of readability. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score was developed by the U.S. Navy as a measure of readability that corresponded to the reading levels of students in U.S. schools. A Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score at the 10th grade level means that the median 10^th grade student in the United States should be able to read it. The two measures are inversely related, although the weights assigned to average sentence length and average syllables per word differ. We use the Flesch Reading Ease Index because it is convenient that larger values indicate greater readability, as is the case with the other readability indexes.

3. Flesch Reading Ease Score = 206.835 − ((1.015 × ASL) + (0.846 × ASW X 100)), where ASL = number of words/number of sentences and ASW = number of syllables/number of words.

4. https://s3.amazonaws.com/Readability_of_Principles_of_Macroeconomics_Textbooks/Apendix_Mechanical_Turk_Survey_Including_Text_Samples.pdf