The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda encourage educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to focus on preparing students for life after high school. A key emphasis is literacy, as the ability to read and comprehend written language is critical to success in college and careers.…

Discusses how current procedures for selecting/constructing equivalent texts may lead to error because of their specific limitations; proposes the utilization of micro-propositional analysis coupled with word-frequency lists and readability formulas for constructing "matching" texts; presents some procedures which researchers working in…

A structured analysis of three basal readers written for grades 2-5 was conducted using the T-unit (any independent clause) as the primary unit of analysis. The number of T-units per 100 words, the number of words per T-unit, the number of clauses per T-unit, and the number of morphemes per T-unit (a new index of linguistic maturity) are reported.…

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

In the context of producing academic research that is more accessible to people with intellectual disabilities, this article proposes publishing academic papers with a "parallel text" which would both provide a simplified version but also facilitate access to the main document. Background research on the idea of parallel texts and technical…

The purposes of this study were to assess the usefulness of a variety of readability formulas in predicting the relative difficulty of passages, and to explore the contribution of pupils' background to text difficulty. Subjects were 285 special education students in grades 1-9, 117 of whom were based in rural and suburban Minnesota (MN) and 168 of…

This bibliography provides citations to studies of word/letter frequencies and vocabulary applications based on issues of word frequency. While the original intent was to gather information pertinent to developing communication board vocabularies for argumentative communication systems, these resources should be useful for a variety of word…

A study examined the readability of vocational horticulture instructional materials used by 40 schools participating in the 1981 Ohio Horticulture Achievement Testing Program. During the first part of the study, researchers administered a mail questionnaire to 31 teachers to identify the materials that were used most frequently, to obtain…

To determine how the difficulty of print materials affected elementary school students' sight copying accuracy and productivity and to explain correlate variance related to copying, 149 students in grades four, six, and eight were assigned materials to copy for three minutes. All subjects copied passages at grade level and at two grades above and…