Complexity as an Impediment to Learning
Carol Minnick Santa, Joan N. Burstyn · The Journal of Higher Education · 1977
According to the Flesch readability analysis, new editions of selected college textbooks are more difficult than former ones. Two experiments demonstrated that undergraduate students in introductory psychology learned less effectively from the latest edition of Introduction to Psychology than they did from the first edition. Based on these data, the authors offer several guidelines for choosing textbooks such as writing style, conceptual density, and the utility of readability analyses.