| How do you know if something you've written is too difficult for your intended audience? How can you tell if your writing makes sense - for the reader you have in mind? Recent advances in the areas of cognitive science, computational linguistics, educational research, and computer science are guiding us toward answers to these questions. These answers are coming to life within a web-based text analysis tool called Coh-Metrix. Using advanced technologies, Coh-Metrix will allow readers, writers, educators, and researchers to instantly gauge the difficulty of written material, based on the target audience. Moreover, CohGIT, our cohesion gap identification tool, will pinpoint where potential problems are hiding within a text. The potential contributions of Coh-Metrix and Coh-GIT are innumerable. This project will benefit writers, editors, researchers, and policy makers. Our overarching goal is to develop methods and standards for improving academic textbooks, thus improving students' ability to understand and learn difficult course material. The Coh-Metrix project has three objectives. - The first objective is to investigate properties of text that affect comprehension and learning. These linguistic properties are collectively referred to as elements of cohesion;
- The second objective is to develop a tool that computes cohesion scores for any given text. This tool is called Coh-Metrix;
- The third objective is to develop a tool that locates zones of high and low cohesion for any given text. This tool is called Coh-GIT.
Empirical research is being conducted to further our understanding of the complex interactions among the text, reader, task and level of understanding. This research will allow us to calibrate Coh-Metrix and Coh-GIT, in addition to advancing theories of reading comprehension. The relationship between the text (cohesion) and the reader's perception of difficulty (coherence) is not straightforward. We are conducting several experiments to investigate effects of text cohesion for young (grades 3-5) and adult readers, and how those effects depend on text genre, prior knowledge, and reading skills Coh-Metrix and Coh-GIT are web-based tools for calculating various types of cohesion: referential, spatial, temporal, causal, and structural, and subsequently identifying the location and type of cohesion gaps within a text. Coh-Metrix evaluates an input text and outputs a series of cohesion scores. Coh-GIT (Cohesion Gap Identification Tool) will identify the location of the cohesion gaps. Users can analyze differences between sections of the same text (such as chapters) or several texts at once, allowing comparisons between texts. Coh-Metrix and CohGIT make use of a variety of psycholinguistic utilities. These are integrated and supplemented with novel cohesion metrics. |
