How might one measure the difficulty of formulae?

[James Hartley]

A colleague of mine has asked about whether or not it is possible to measure 
the difficulty of formulae in a statistics text.  He writes thus:

 > I certainly agree that it would be helpful if we could
> apply a way of measuring the complexity of a textbook statistics formula, 
> rather than simply noting its occurrence.  I don’t know of any such metric 
> (the only thing that I can think of is the number of alphanumeric 
> characters in the equation), but I will check into this. (Do you know 
> anyone to ask about this?)  It would certainly be helpful if we had a 
> cardinal measure of equation complexity, similar to the way that a Flesch 
> score gives a cardinal measure of word content complexity.
>
>Anyone any ideas!

Cheers

Jim

James Hartley
School of psychology
Keele University
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG
UK

j.hartley at psy.keele.ac.uk

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