The readability of paediatric patient information materials: Are families satisfied with our handouts and brochures?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To determine the grade reading level of eight easily available patient handouts for parents of children with otitis media, to calculate the internal reliability and consistency of seven readability tests, and to explore the relationship between the grade reading level of a handout and parent satisfaction. METHODS: Eight patient handouts developed for the parents of children with otitis media were collected, stripped of all formatting and analyzed using seven different readability formulas. Cronbach's alpha and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were calculated to determine the internal reliability and consistency of the seven formulas. Parents were surveyed on their satisfaction with three of the handouts, and their responses were compared with the handouts' reading grade levels using ANOVA. RESULTS: Only four of the eight handouts had a mean grade 8 or less reading level. None of the handouts had a grade 5 or less reading level. Cronbach's alpha was calculated to be 0.990, single measures ICC 0.931 and average class ICC 0.990, indicating extremely high internal reliability/consistency among the different readability tests. One-way ANOVA showed no evidence of a significant difference in parental satisfaction with the three handouts tested, despite their different grade reading levels (grades 7, 10 and 14) (P=0.24). CONCLUSIONS: While many readability formulas are available, the high internal reliability/consistency among them indicates that only one formula needs to be used to assess readability (eg, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula). Because there was no difference in parental satisfaction among three patient handouts that had widely different grade reading levels, studies should explore whether writing patient information materials explicitly to achieve low grade reading level scores is a worthwhile strategy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".