Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...212.4006b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #212, #40.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.241
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Increasingly, first-year students have reading deficiencies and do not have the academic discipline to read introductory textbooks. Few students have the skills needed to organize ideas elicited from texts, and even fewer seem capable of evaluating ideas and concepts as to importance. While the amount of pedagogical support has increased in introductory astronomy texts in recent years, it is worthwhile to investigate how the readability of these books has changed with time.
Dukes and co-authors (1979, 1980, 1983) surveyed numerous introductory astronomy textbooks using the Flesch Readability index. For a direct comparison to Dukes' work, I have used Flesch's index to survey three groups of introductory astronomy texts. Group I samples editions from Dukes' surveys to normalize the current survey and to provide a text baseline from 25 years ago, while group II includes texts from the 1940s and 1950s and group III current texts to compare the readability of present texts with those from previous decades.
At first glance, this study indicates that texts have not changed in readability over the past several decades. However, other issues arise when the results are investigated in detail. Flesch measures readability but not understandability; understandability may have changed. Reading load has increased as texts have increased in size from 478 to 605 pages, on average. While texts may have a grade 11-12 reading level, that is an average and parts of texts soar to post-graduate reading levels; the ups and downs may affect student comprehension. Readability is just one measure for analyzing texts and these other issues may be more important for judging why our students have difficulty reading introductory astronomy books.
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