Readability of Home Appliance Instruction Manuals: An Assessment With Children

Several household tasks in which children are reported to participate may involve use of mechanical or automatic home appliances. To contribute to safe use, instruction manuals to which children may need to refer, especially when theyare home alone, should be understandable to them. Cloze tests for analysis of readability of instructions for use and care of 13 major and portable home appliances were administered to 477 childrenfrom ages 8 to 17 years. Scores were associated with age and/or grade level with given appliances. For most appliances, the scoresfor children were clustered in the 30% to 40% range of agreement with the original passages.