Faculty and Staff

Readability formulas are used widely in education, and increasingly in business and government. Over 30 years of research on more than 200 readability formulas has demonstrated moderate to strong predictive correlations with reading comprehension. In this study, five well-known readability formulas correlated highly with each other when applied to selected recent historical articles (N = 22) from two music education research journals. The mean level of difficulty (readability) for all 22 articles was grade 14.04, near the beginning of the second year of college. Since research shows that most people read below their highest completed school grade and also prefer easier materials, this is probably an appropriate level of difficulty for the presumptive readers of these two journals (i.e., holders of undergraduate and graduate degrees). Professors, librarians, and others responsible for guiding students toward reading material at appropriate levels of readability could benefit from these results.

This research study will discover and evaluate information about existing crowdsourcing or participatory archives projects devoted to archival description, indexing or transcription. Many related projects that use crowdsourcing for collecting archival materials from the public are not specifically addressed here. In this research, the author has specifically sought evaluative information about exemplary projects that can lead to useful specifications for a participatory archives system at Arizona State University Libraries.

Historical research produced for a portion of the exhibit entitled Civil Rights in Arizona, which was displayed at the Luhrs Gallery, Hayden Library in 2012-2013. The action at the ROTC Building was one of the largest protests in Arizona State University history, resulting in the arrest of ten individuals. The second file, entitled "Who Were the Tempe Ten?", describes the arrested students and unaffiliated persons.