Lists the dangers of readability formulas and concludes that while they may be a necessary evil, they should not be used as the underlying structure of a reading program. (FL)

Two studies investigated the relationships between readability, prior knowledge, and interest in the material being read. In the first study, 169 college freshmen read cloze passages of materials from the Nelson-Denny Reading Tests, then one week later read the whole passages and completed the related multiple choice questions. A control group…

A three-part correlational study examined the explanatory power of the Lexile theory of reading comprehension, which was based on the semantic and syntactic components of prose. Correlations were performed between the item difficulties of nine nationally normed reading comprehension tests and computer generated difficulties which were reported in…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles include studies of an informal reading inventory; an item-type to test phonic and context skills; reliability of residual gain scores based on means for a standardized reading achievement measure; alternatives to…