The Readability of Children's Reference Materials
Marilyn Domas White · The Library Quarterly · 1990
This paper assesses the readability of reference books recommended for use with children by looking at fourteen topics commonly sought by children across ten texts. The results are analyzed by type of text: children's encyclopedias, adult encyclopedias, and subject-reference books. The study uses two techniques: linguistic analysis summarized in a reading formula (Flesch-Kincaid) and propositional analysis (Bovair and Kieras method), resulting in a measure of the idea density level. The results show that subject books suggested for reference use with children more closely resemble adult encyclopedias in both reading level and the density of ideas per sentence than they resemble children's encyclopedias. There is a dearth of reference materials written for younger children; only about 25 percent of the articles in the sample were written at grade levels five through eight, and none were written below the fifth-grade level.