Background. Readability and comprehension are the critical points of software developmentand maintenance. There are many researcher point out that the duplicatecode as a code smell has effect on software maintainability, but lack of research abouthow duplicate code affect software readability and comprehension, which are parts of maintainability. Objectives. In this thesis, we aim to briefly summarize the impact of duplicatecode and typical types of duplicate code according to current works, then our goalis to explore whether duplicate code is a factor to influence readability and comprehension. Methods. In our present research, we did a background survey to asked some background questions from forty-two subjects to help us classify them, and conduct an experiment with subjects to explore the role of duplicate code on perceived readability and comprehension by experiment. The perceived readability and comprehension are measured by perceived readability scale, reading time and the accuracy of cloze test. Results. The experimental data shows code with duplication have higher perceived readability and better comprehension, however, the difference are not significant.And code with duplication cost less reading time than code without duplication,and the difference is significant. But duplication type are strongly associate with perceived readability. For reading time, it is significant associate with duplication type and size of code. While there do not exists significant correlation between programmingexperience of subjects and perceived readability or comprehension, andit also has no significant relation between perceived readability and comprehension,size and CC according to our data results. Conclusions. Code with duplication has higher software readability according tothe results of reading time, which is significant. And code with duplication has highercomprehension than code without duplication, but the difference is not statistically significant according to our experimental results. Longer size of code will increasereading time, and different duplication type also influence the perceived readability,the three duplication types we discussed show these relationship obviously.

Fem till åtta procent av Sveriges befolkning är diagnostiserade med dyslexi och nästan tjugofem procent har läs- och skrivsvårigheter. Nittiofyra procent av Sveriges befolkning använder internet inom alla områden i vardagen, allt från utbildning och arbete till att läsa nyhetstidningar och söka information i uppslagsverk.Från tidigare forskning är det känt att kunskap om att tillgänglighet på webben är ett problem för personer med dyslexi, men inte tillräckligt många människor tar ansvar för att det ska förändras. Vår värld går från analog till digital i dagens digitalisering, därför är det viktigt att göra digitalt innehåll tillgängligt för alla typer av människor, oavsett funktionsnedsättning eller inte.Denna studie syftar till att få en djupare förståelse, genom ett frågeformulär, angående hur människor med dyslexi och/eller läs och skrivsvårigheter upplever tillgängligheten på webben idag. Studien identifierar vilka hinder dessa människor står inför när de försöker få ta del av information på webben och analyserar hur de identifierade och analyserade hindren kan användas för att skapa en ”easy-to-use-and-implement” verktygslåda. För att validera om verktygslådan hade kunnat användas på webbplatser för att anpassa hur informationen visas och därmed öka tillgängligheten, genomfördes ett användbarhetstest. När användaren inkluderas tidigt i processen är det möjligt att förbättra prototypen innan den släpps live och görs tillgänglig för utvecklare. Användbarhetstestet genomfördes i form av ett Think Aloud protocol och syftade till att koppla samman både slutanvändarens tankar med beteendet under tiden verktygslådan användes.Resultatet av studien visar att majoriteten av deltagarna inte tycker att speciellt många webbplatser idag är anpassade för personer med dyslexi. De tycker också att webbplatser borde erbjuda möjlighet att anpassa hur innehållet visas på webbsidor utan att behöva använda webbläsartillägg. Resultatet visar på att prototypen innehåller funktionalitet som minskar dessa hinder för personer med dyslexi. Man kan också se att den tidigare forskning av färger, teckensnitt, textstorlek och radavstånd är fyra av sex kategorier som deltagarna i denna studien anger som de största hindren när man försöker ta del av information på webbplatser idag. Vad deltagarna också upplevde, var att verktygsfältet hade kunnat innehålla fler val inom de utvalda kategorierna för att anpassa verktygsfältet för den enskilda personen istället för en stor grupp människor. Det är också ett av förslagen för framtida forskning. / Five to eight percent of Sweden's population is diagnosed with dyslexia and almost twenty-five percent experience reading and writing difficulties. Ninety-four percent of Sweden's population uses the internet in all areas of life, from education and work to reading newspapers and gathering information from encyclopedias. From previous research, it is known that web accessibility is a problem for people with dyslexia, but not enough people take action. The world goes from analog to digital in today's digitalization, therefore it is important to make the digital content available and accessible for all kinds of people, regardless of disability or not.This study aims to get a deeper understanding, through a questionnaire, of how people with dyslexia and/or reading and writing disabilities experience the accessibility on websites today. The study identifies what obstacles these people face when they try to access information on websites and how the identified and analyzed obstacles could be used to create an easy-to-use-and-implement toolbar to help people overcome these obstacles.. To validate if the toolbar could be used on websites to customize how the information is displayed and thereby access the information easier, a usability test was conducted. When the user is included early in the process, it is possible to improve the prototype before it is released live and available for developers to implement on their websites. The usability test was conducted through a Think Aloud protocol and aimed to connect the end-users thoughts with their behavior while using the component. The result of the study shows that the majority of the participants do not think that many websites today are adapted for people with dyslexia and think websites should offer the ability to customize how the content is displayed on web pages without having to use browser extensions. The result also shows that the easy-to-use-and-implement toolbar includes functionality that will decrease these obstacles for people with dyslexia. You can also see that the previous research on colors, font style, font size, and line spacing is four of six categories the participants in this study see, as the biggest obstacles when they try to access information on websites today. What they also experienced was that the toolbar should include more choices within these categories to customize the toolbar for the individual person instead of a large group of people, which also is one of the suggestions for future research.

The reading abilities of trade and industrial education students enrolled in the six trade and industrial education courses of automotive mechanics, building construction , drafting, electronics , machine shop, and welding in the six high school s of Granite School District were studied in relation to the rated readability of basic textbooks used in those courses . Additional relationships were studied between student reading abilities and intelligence, between course grades and intelligence, and between course grades and reading abilities. The mean reading ability of the 388 trade and industrial education students included in the study assessed by administering the California Reading Test for grades nine through 14 , was found to be 10.8 for the eleventh grade students, 11. l for the twelfth grade students, and 11.0 for all students included in the study . These abilities ranged from ~grade six to grade 15. Electronics students had the highest average reading ability measured at 12. 4, while the average welding student was reading at grade 10 . 3. Thece weJ' <= h4 . -J percent or 87 eleventh grade students reading below their assigned grade level and 60. 1 percent or 137 twelfth grade students reading below their assigned grade level. Little relationship was found between average student grades and their intelligence quotients, or between average student grades and reading level , while the correlation between Intelligence quotient and average reading ability was relatively high. The rated readability of basic textbooks used by the students in the six courses was obtained through the application of both the Dale -Chall, and the SMOG formulas. A significant difference was found between the average reading ability of students and the readability of the basic textbook they were using. Reading abilities of average students in automotive mechanics, electron ics, and welding courses were below the rated readability of the corresponding textbooks . Reading abilities of average students in building construction, draft ing, and machine shop courses were above the rated readability of each of the corresponding textbooks . The following conclusions were drawn from the data analyzed In the study: 1. The reading grade level of students in trade and industrial educ ation courses is more important as a factor in determining a suitable level of read ability for a basic textbook than the usual criterion of the assigned grade level of a course or a student's grade placement. 2. A basic textbook should have the capacity to interest the more able students as well as the slower readers . 3. More effort must be expended to help less able readers understand and relate the vocabulary of a technical type course . 4. Teachers should take into consideration the individual reading ability of students in planning their instruction rather than assume all students to be read ing at grade level. 5. Of the factors used in assessing the rated readability of textbooks, vocabulary was more important than sentence length. 6. None of the basic textbooks analyzed exhibited a progression of read ing difficulty from easy material at the beginning of the textbook to more difficult material towards the end of the textbook. 7. Although there was a wide variation in the mental abilities of students, generally students with high mental ability had a high reading ability. 8. The results of applying a one-way analysis of variance to student reading data from two of the courses , building construction and electronics , which were taught in a ll six high schools, indicated the reading grade level of students was not affected by the geographical area in which the student resided.

This research will contribute to the literature of managerial ability and analyst following as well as narrative disclosure in the following ways. This study is the first to investigate the association between managerial ability and external information intermediaries such as financial analysts to the best of our knowledge. Most of the earlier studies on managerial ability focus on firms’ internal information environment such as operating and financial decisions, and limited studies examine the relation between managerial ability with external perception of the information environment and narrative disclosures. We extend this literature by examining how managerial ability impacts the firm's external information environment, affecting informational intermediaries' work processes, such as financial analysts. We find that managers' higher ability leads to better performance by financial analysts regarding their forecast error, dispersion, and willingness to provide coverage on the firm. We also step further by employing more advanced and novel measures to assess managerial ability's impact on market intermediaries’ external work and perception. Able managers impact reporting informativeness, response time, and the uncertainty of the forecasts from financial analysts. Further, we examine informational channels or mediators (i.e., analyst following and readability of narrative disclosure), highlighting how managerial ability can be linked the better performance by financial analysts. We intend to show how variables like disclosure readability and analyst following mediate between managerial ability and analyst forecast properties (i.e., error and Dispersion). In the last part of the research, we answer how analysts' better performance can be a channel to help able managers increase their firms' value (i.e., analyst’s forecast error acts as the channel from the managerial ability to firm’s performance).

No description available.

Reading is a fundamental skill that each person needs to develop during early childhood and continue to enhance into adulthood. While children/teenagers depend on this skill to advance academically and become educated individuals, adults are expected to acquire a certain level of proficiency in reading so that they can engage in social/civic activities and successfully participate in the workforce. A step towards assisting individuals to become lifelong readers is to provide them adequate reading selections which can cultivate their intellectual and emotional growth. Turning to (web) search engines for such reading choices can be overwhelming, given the huge volume of reading materials offered as a result of a search. An alternative is to rely on reading materials suggested by existing recommendation systems, which unfortunately are not capable of simultaneously matching the information needs, preferences, and reading abilities of individual readers. In this dissertation, we present novel recommendation strategies which identify appealing reading materials that the readers can comprehend, which in turn can motivate them to read. In accomplishing this task, we have examined used-defined data, in addition to information retrieved/inferred from reputable and freely-accessible online sources. We have incorporated the concept of “social trust” when making recommendations for advanced readers and suggested fiction books that match the reading ability of individual K-12 readers using our readability-analysis tool for books. Furthermore, we have emulated the readers' advisory service offered at school/public libraries in making recommendations for K-12 readers, which can be applied to advanced readers as well. A major contribution of our work is in the development of unsupervised recommendation strategies for advanced readers which suggest reading materials for both entertainment and learning acquisition purposes. Unlike their counterparts, these recommendation strategies are unaffected by the cold-start or long-tail problems, since they exploit user-defined data (if available) while taking advantage of alternative publicly-available metadata. Our readability-analysis tool is innovative, which can predict the readability-levels of books on-the-fly, even in the absence of excerpts from books, a task that cannot be accomplished by any of the well-known readability tools/strategies. Moreover, our multi-dimensional recommendation strategy is novel, since it simultaneously analyzes the reading abilities of K-12 readers, which books readers enjoy, why the books are appealing to them, and what subject matters the readers favor. Besides assisting K-12 readers, our recommender can be used by parents/teachers/librarians in locating reading materials to be suggested to their (K-12) children/students/patrons. We have validated the performance of each methodology presented in this dissertation using existing benchmark datasets or datasets we created for the evaluation purpose (which is another contribution we make to the research community). We have also compared the performance of our proposed methodologies with their corresponding baselines and state-of-the-art counterparts, which further verifies the correctness of the proposed methodologies.

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the underlying factors involved in introducing authentic literature to the EFL classroom. The purpose has been to establish which factors should be considered in order to facilitate both the discrepancies between more literate pupils and less literate pupils, and the differing experiences and backgrounds of the class as a whole. The research focuses on the introduction of literature within whole group reading sessions, and considers factors such as equal reading levels versus below reading levels, protagonist gender, book titles and the amount of English read outside of the classroom.The dissertation discusses the reliability of readability programs, vocabulary required in order to comprehend second language literature, pupils’ ever increasing contact with English outside of school and pupils’ reactions to texts deemed either equal or below their own literacy level. In a classroom investigation, pupils were presented with texts taken from books judged to be either equal to or below their suggested age group, and asked to comment on their reading experiences. Results showed that texts from both sectors were received favourably, and that factors such as genre, protagonist gender and the book’s title were more decisive factors to a book’s popularity. Indeed, pupils noticed little or no difference in books written for a younger audience. Furthermore, an interview with an English teacher at a compulsory school confirmed that a book’s suggested age range had little or no importance when choosing texts for the classroom, and suggests that vocabulary focus in class can combat any discrepancy in pupil literacy levels.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.