Predicting accuracy of comprehension from the relative difficulty of the material

Abstract

The functional relationship between the relative difficulty of passages and the degree to which they are comprehended was investigated. Relative difficulty was defined as the accuracy level (A l ) of the reader minus the difficulty level (D l ) of the material when both were measured in grade equivalent (GE) units; relative difficulty was A l — D l . A total of 568 students in grades 3–12 and graduate school were given passages to read at difficulty levels varying from D L = 2 to D L = 17, and relative difficulty varied from −8 to +10. A standardized reading test—the Accuracy Level Test—was used to estimate A l for each student, and two different readability techniques were used to estimate D l for each passage. The students were asked to decide what percent of each passage they comprehended after they had read it, and this judgement constituted an estimate of the accuracy of comprehension. The percent of passage comprehension was found to be a linear function of the relative difficulty of the material. The accuracy of comprehension can be predicted quite precisely from a mathematical equation given a knowledge of the level of difficulty of the material and the level of ability of the individual.