Psychologists love to measure things, and perhaps nothing has been measured as much by psychologists as reading—both texts and readers. Multiple different instruments measuring text readability have ...

Jess Hutchison’s daughter Sawyer, 8, is often bored by the books she gets assigned based on her reading level at school. And she’s not the only one. “Many of them are dumb. They’re just nonsensical,” ...

But where did the number come from? It was generated by a mathematical readability formula. Invented in the 1920s after science teachers expressed a desire for more simplified texts for their students ...