Previous work has demonstrated the role of reading skill and prior chemistry knowledge in a student's success in general chemistry. In addition to student characteristics, linguistic aspects of the learning materials with which students interact also impact the quality of the mental representations students construct from texts. In this study, five commonly used general chemistry books were analyzed with Coh-Metrix, a tool that measures linguistic characteristics of discourse and text. Our results constitute a survey of five measures of text difficulty that were used to assess common learning materials deployed in the general chemistry classroom. The results presented demonstrate that general chemistry books are relatively high in cohesion, which has been shown to be optimal for students with very little relevant domain knowledge.

Evaluation of the linguistic characteristics of general chemistry textbooks

247th National Meeting (2014)

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