According to the Presidential Decree number 347/2002 from 17.04.2002 “On National Doctrine of Education Development” and the National Strategy for the Development of Education in Ukraine for 2012- 2021, state policy in education development is the constant improvement of its quality. The main criterion to ensure the quality of education – the creation of modern educational literature, an important characteristic of which from the student point of view is texts complexity determined by the readability index.
Education in today’s environment requires new and improved textbooks, which would correspond to the advanced tendencies of the development of science and technology, and information technology. Lectures and practical courses should be different in terms of complexity for the students of various courses and, of course, be easier for the first year students and more difficult for graduates – specialists and masters.
In Internet there are enough programs for determining the complexity of the educational literature texts. One of the best and easy to use program is “Chytanka” which automatically calculates such indicators: Gunning fog index (Ifog), Flesch–Kincaid index (IF), SMOG index (ISMOG), readability index (IARI) and Coleman-Liu index (ICL), and the average index of readability.
Thanks to the cooperation with scientific staff of the Danylo Galitsky National Medical University and the department of technology of biologically active substances, pharmacy and biotechnology of National University “Lviv Polytechnic”, this program has been improved and adapted to the analysis of complexity of technical texts in Ukrainian for students – technologists of pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.
The best demonstration of the use of advanced program “Chytanka” is readability studies of “Environmental Biotechnology” by O.Shved, O.Mykoliv, O. Komaravska-Porokhniavets, V.Novikov The textbook is a monograph in 2 parts, sections of which can be used to study individual subjects by students of different courses.
Analysis of the textbook, which is designed for students of the direction 6.051401 “Biotechnology” and specialty 8.05140103 “Pharmaceutical Biotechnology”, showed the expediency of experimental determination of readability index and its compliance with the number of years of prior studying of students.
We believe that while creating new textbooks for the students as well as analyzing the existing ones, it would be useful to use the program “Chytanka” because it will allow to determine the lucidity of texts and their compliance with appropriate scientific and methodological level, which, no doubt, will improve the quality of national education.
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2. роект Національної стратегії розвитку освіти в Україні на 2012–2021р. [Електронний ресурс]. – Режим доступу: http://www.nmu.edu.ua/files/strateg_rozv_2012.pdf.
3. ряд схвалив Національну стратегію розвитку освіти до 2021 року [Електронний ресурс]. – Режим до Режим доступу: http://www.kmu.gov.ua/control/publish/article. 4. Комп’ютерна програма аналізу складності текстів “Читанка”. [Електронний ресурс] /автори: А. В. Горілик, Д. В. Горілик, Б. П. Громовик. – Режим доступу: http://read.adfarm.com.ua.
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