The purpose of this article is to present qualitative and quantitative tools to assist teachers and authors of examination materials in their preliminary assessment of text complexity/difficulty according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The qualitative scales were compiled specially for this study, based on previous…

In this study, it is aimed to determine at what level the Meaning Identification Technique (MIT) can measure the reading comprehension skills of the 4th grade primary school students and to test the validity and reliability of the MIT test with different types of texts. In the study carried out in the survey model, MIT and Sentence Verification…

Background: Readability tests are indicators that measure how easy a document can be read and understood. Simple, but very often ignored, readability statistics cannot only provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents but also can increase an evaluator's credibility. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Common Core Reading Standard 10 not only prescribes the difficulty of texts students should become able to read, but also the difficulty diet of texts schools should ask their students to read across the school year. The use of quantitative text-assessment tools in the implementation of this standard warrants an examination into the validity of…

Raises doubts about the validity of readability formulas. (RB)

The passage comprehensibility of three diagnostic reading tests--the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales, and the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty--was evaluated using the following text variables: content familiarity, vocabulary, the number of idea units in the text, the number of text-based inferences…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

Reviews the Sucher-Allred Reading Placement Inventory (S-ARPI), a commercially produced test that is similar in many respects to informal reading inventories. (RB)

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)

General information about the cloze technique and summaries of experiments with adults and children in which it was used are presented. Results indicated that the most valid and reliable cloze test for measuring passage difficulty is one in which (1) an every nth mechanical mutilation system is used, (2) not more than 20 words in every 100 are…

Concludes that individuals can read unfamiliar but relatively easy material at high rates with high accuracy of comprehension, but they do not provide strong support for rauding theory. (FL)

This article reports on a series of experiments designed to determine the validity of the Cloze test as a measure of the English language proficiency of nonnative speakers. (CFM)

An overall look is taken at the cloze research method as a new tool for measuring readability. The construction of a cloze readability test is described as well as several studies made on the reliability and validity of such tests. Included also are some methodological considerations to be kept in mind when constructing a cloze test. Data is…

An investigation of reading comprehension tests was undertaken in this doctoral dissertation study to find out what the tests evaluate. The history of standardized reading tests and of efforts to define comprehension was traced. Standardized tests from three batteries (California Achievement Test, Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test, and Stanford…