Information on COVID-19 provided online by the White House, CDC and state health departments may be too complex for a general audience, a new study shows.
The CDC, American Medical Association and National Institutes of Health all recommend that medical information for the public be written at an eighth-grade reading level and no higher. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, includes an analysis of 137 web pages from federal and state sources. The researchers reviewed the web pages between April 1 and April 5.
Researchers found that federal communications about COVID-19 averaged just over an 11th-grade reading level.
They also found information shared when the COVID-19 pandemic began exceeded recommendations on the number of words in a sentence, word size and the use of difficult terms related to public health.
All 50 U.S. state governments provided COVID-19 information written above the eighth-grade reading level.
"The differences between eighth-grade and 11th-grade reading levels are crucial," said Joseph Dexter, PhD, senior study author and a fellow at Dartmouth's Neukom Institute for Computational Science in Hanover, N.H. "Text written at a higher grade level can place greater demands on the reader and cause people to miss key information."
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