An Investigation and Assessment of the Readability Level of the 6th-Grade Primacy School Science Textbook

A textbook is a tool used by teachers to arouse their students’ curiosity and provide them with maximum awareness, understanding, and information about a certain issue or topic; thus, it is considered a fundamental element of transmitting educational messages in the process of education. A characteristic of the textbook is that the content developed for each grade should match the cognitive development of the target population. Readability formulas are among the techniques to analyze the content of textbooks. They analyze the content of a piece of writing or a text to measure its readability degree. Such analyses determine the difficulty of the texts using certain formulas. Moreover, they determine the compatibility of the texts with the age, class level, or reading ability of the target students. The present study aimed to investigate and assess the readability of the 6th-grade primary school science textbook based on three formulas for content analysis proposed by McLaughlin, Gunning fog, and Hartley. The present study implemented content analysis and used methods that were objective-quantitative in nature. The study was applied in terms of the goal, and the population consisted of the content of the 6th-grade primary school science textbook. The findings showed that the texts analyzed by the formulas of McLaughlin and Gunning Fog were higher than the ability level envisaged for the 6th-grade students. On the other hand, the Hartley formula showed the content of the textbook was below the students’ levels, and it was too easy for them.