Critical Reading and Evaluation on the Internet

Ever since I first became a teacher (8 years ago, after being a computer programmer), I have been saying the same types of things as this quote by Michelle Herczog, pointed out on the Teachinghistory.org website: "Education as a paradigm needs to change from acquiring knowledge, to finding, understanding, and using knowledge to become responsible, engaged members of the human race capable of solving complex problems in a complex world."

This is easier said than done. There are still a lot of old-school teachers (and even standards) requiring kids to use dictionaries, and even when they ask students to look up information "on the web", they use the same guidelines as finding information in a library. This is a big no-no, because it doesn't take into account that anybody can publish anything on the web; at least with print materials, there is some level of editing and filtration that goes on (which is not to say you shouldn't read newspapers, magazines, etc. with a critical eye as well...)

This article about learning about history facts using the Internet has links to some good resources to emphasize the skill: Is the Internet a Reliable Source for History Content?

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level and Calculators

So, here's something interesting: I am developing a program to assist students in reading, and as such I am looking into automated systems for determining readability/difficulty of any given text. One popular automated algorithm is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which tells you a supposed grade level of text based on word length and sentence length. Seems simple enough, right? In fact, the formula is here:


Why, then, does every Flesch-Kincaid calculator I use return different numbers... sometimes drastically different.

Microsoft Word: Flesch Reading Ease - 51.9, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 8.8
Joe's Web Tools: Flesch Reading Ease - 59.6, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 7.8
Standards-schmandards Readability Index Calculator: Flesch Reading Ease - 37, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 11 (I find this highly unlikely)