Abstract Difficulties that are encountered by students in the first course in taxation may be traced to their difficulties in comprehending the course's assigned text material. Using an analysis that is accepted widely in the reading and journalism literature, the "cloze" procedure, the authors assess the comprehensibility of selected federal taxation textbooks, and they discuss several implications of their analysis for accounting students and educators, and for textbook authors and editors. None of the selected textbooks were found to be readable by the experimental subjects, and two of the texts were found to be less readable than both the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury Regulations. This problem places undue burden upon taxation students. Textbook authors and editors must address this readability problem, as it has serious implications for all of tax education and practice.
Raabe et al. (Sat,) studied this question.