Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2013

Throughout their school career, students should be able to read increasingly more difficult texts. In this paper we discuss the importance of leveling (adapting the difficulty of texts to students’ reading proficiency), and we investigate which guidelines are available for educational publishers who would like to vary the complexity of their texts. Because of the need for evidence-based pieces of writing advice and the lack of empiric Read More

In September 2012, the NWO-project Voting Advice Via Internet has started. In this research project, we investigate, among other things, how various wording aspects of voting advice applications (VAAs) influence the answers given to the VAA statements. The current article investigates the effects of two wording aspects: valence framing (“Wearing niqabs in public should be forbidden” vs. “Wearing niqabs in public should be Read More

In 2011, Kraf, Lentz & Pander Maat published a study in this journal into three automated tools for measuring the readability of texts written in Dutch: Texamen, Klinkende Taal and Accessibility Leesniveau Tool. Among other things, Kraf et al. (2011) showed that the outcomes of the three tools often differed from each other. It was not clear yet, however, how the predictions from these measuring instruments would compa Read More

The present study focused on factors that predict students’ difficulties with process diagrams. From 18 compulsory national Biology exams of secondary school pre-university students all process diagram tasks (n = 64) were included in corpus. Features of the task, student, and diagram were related to the difficulty (i.e., 1- cohort mean exam score) of that particular task. A hierarchical regression analysis showed main eff Read More

In research investigating the effectiveness of letters from charitable organizations recruiting donors and volunteers, otherbenefit appeals (focusing on the benefits for others) have been compared to self-benefit appeals (focusing on the benefits for the reader). Because the benefits presented in the two types of appeal were generally dissimilar in earlier research, the current study used similar benefits for the two appeals. In addit Read More