How much information do our students understand when they read online? I am often speaking to the students about not using google as their first place to go when researching. All students should be taught a web evaluation tool and Kathy Shrock’s 5W’s of website evaluation is suitable for primary aged students and the CRAP test is great for older students.

Another important element of evaluation websites is to assess the readability of websites. There was an activity in ETL501 module two where we were required to use readability software to test the reading level of different content. I had never used a tool like this before and think they are really useful and am quite excited by this new tool in my learning kit. In fact, I am writing about it in this post so that I can share this with the staff. Four such tools are:

• Prepostseo Readability checker
• WebFX
• Readability test from online utility
• Readable

With all of them, you can cut and paste part of a text and it will scan the text and provide scores using readability indicators. These include the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level which tells you the American school grade you would need to be in to comprehend the text and the Gunning Fog Score which estimates the years of formal education needed to comprehend a text. I have explored these tools with lots of different texts and find them a useful guide for finding age appropriate content. I found it very surprising how high some of the results came back with paragraphs from Wikipedia (often a student’s first search result) scoring reading comprehension results suitable for 24 year olds. I even used them with some articles from Britannica in the different levels and some text in the easiest level was coming back as being suitable for year 7s! It has made me think again and how challenging reading online can be for some of our students. It also made me reflect again on the importance of sharing tools with students that have audio support and ones with videos.

It is worth raising that the results were not all consistent with each other. I found WebFX the easiest to use and it is also completely free. It allows you to cut and paste part of a text or to add in a URL and it will test the whole site. The fact that the same piece of text in the different tools would come back with different reading ages really highlights the importance of teacher librarians and teachers curating resources to guide students when researching. This is one tool that can be used to help, but teacher support is clearly something that really needs to take place to support students in developing information literacy skills.

References

Mitchell, P. (2017). Critical thinking tool – the CRAP test. Teacher. Retrieved from https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/articles/critical-thinking-tools-the-crap-test

Online Utility (2009). Readability calculator. Retrieved from https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp

Readable. (2019). The Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Retrieved from https://readable.com/blog/the-flesch-reading-ease-and-flesch-kincaid-grade-level/

Schrock. K. (2009). The 5W’s of website evaluation. Retrieved from http://www.schrockguide.net/uploads/3/9/2/2/392267/5ws.pdf