A Missouri study was conducted to investigate the reading abilities of the average vocational technical student to determine if this reading ability was commensurate with the material the student was assigned to read, and to compare the effectiveness of the reading ability to success in completing a vocational course of study. In order to secure…

The reading abilities of low achieving high school students at two schools were compared to the readability levels of the magazines in which they showed interest. The median tested reading ability of these students was reported as third/fourth grade by their reading teachers. The reading specialist at one high school reported that boys had an…

THE FLESCH READING EASE FORMULA WAS APPLIED TO SELECTED SECTIONS OF THE 1965-66 FACULTY HANDBOOKS FROM 61 CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA JUNIOR COLLEGES IN AN EFFORT TO DETERMINE WHETHER THEY WERE WRITTEN IN A STYLE TO PROVIDE MAXIMUM OPPORTUNITY FOR COMPREHENSION. THE HANDBOOK SECTIONS STUDIED WERE (1) INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL, (2) GRADING POLICIES AND…

Horizontal readability, the analysis of essentially similar passages through classification of words and phrases according to their cognitive similarity, is discussed in relation to its usefulness in differentiating among materials designed for the same reading level. Three studies of horizontal readability in which passages were rated for high…

The variables used in most readability formulas consist of counts of language elements which highly relate to comprehension scores on passages of a wide range of difficulty. The variables most often used are some measure of word difficulty and yield an index score representing the style difficulty of the passages to which they are applied…

Samples of government publications, legal documents, newspapers, paperback novels, and instruction manuals were among the items used in a study to determine the degree to which the readability levels of materials used by adults reflect an awareness of and adjustment to the average reading ability of the adult population. The readability levels of…

One can measure the readability of any piece of reading material for an individual or a group by having the selection read and then testing for comprehension. Increasingly the cloze procedure has come to be used in preference to multiple-choice questions. Other readability scales have been based on previously scaled passages, on carefully graded…

Reported are results of a survey in which 13 series of secondary level geography textbooks were tested to determine readability. Findings indicate that there is little difference in the readability level of geography texts published for grade six and those published for the secondary level. References are included. (Author/DB)

To explore the readability of different levels of accounting textbooks, samples were selected from three high school, three vocational, and three college textbooks. The statistical tests conducted indicated that mean reading levels increased in difficulty as grade levels increased and that reading levels were considerably below grade levels of the…

An evaluation of elementary social studies textbooks indicates that eight factors are making textbooks harder to read. These factors are: (1) the reading level of the book and/or the range of reading levels within it; (2) long sentences and/or too many concepts within a sentence or paragraph; (3) the use of vague terms, technical vocabulary, and…

Two college freshman required texts were chosen for analysis of readability and of cloze performance on selected passages. One cloze passage was administered to each of 218 students enrolled in General Psychology and Principles of Biology courses. Dale-Chall readability levels were separately calculated for the same passages. Reading levels of the…

The effects of training on internal reading flexibility (intra-article flexibility) and the relationships between such flexibility and overall reading speed, reading comprehension, anxiety level, and introversion-extraversion were investigated. Flexibility coefficients were computed before and after training for the total group of 255 college…

The differences between the reading abilities of 359 community-college students in selected classes and the readability difficulty of the texts used in those classes were examined. The Diagnostic Reading Test, Form A was administered to the subjects, and results showed that 35.9 percent of the population read at or above grade level 13; 33.5…

Raises questions about the readability criteria used by publishers and editors of reading textbooks in selecting and assembling materials for middle grade reading texts. (RL)