The usefulness of a readability formula as a technique for evaluating the reading levels of abstracts was investigated using the abstracts published in "Research in Education." (Author/PF)

Reports that the writing of textbooks, once the domain of professional educators, has increasingly become a field for professional writers and journalists. (RB)

Reports the results of evaluating 15 college catalogs using the Fry readability formula; 73 percent of the catalogs had readability levels at or above grade 17 suggesting that colleges need to adjust their materials to a younger audience. (Author/WD)

Summarizes a report noting that although federal regulations require that summary plan descriptions (SPDs) of pensions must be written at low readability levels, both the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) regulating such plans and a mandatory statement for inclusion in SPDs are written at an exceptionally difficult college level.…

Examines the relationship between advertising copy readability and advertising effectiveness. Finds that recall is improved when the copy style is either fairly easy or fairly hard to read. Suggests the value of considering copy readability as a potential contributor, though a minor one, to the success of magazine advertising. (RS)

Traces the career of Jack Stenner. Stenner made the empirical discovery that observable readability could be entirely predicted from word familiarity and sentence length, and applied this "Lexile Framework"(R) to books and readers. Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework as a way to target specific readers. (SLD)

This article describes the development and validation of a short version of the Index of Race-Related Stress - Brief Version (IRSS-B). The IRRS-B is a 22-item, multidimensional measure of the race-related stress experienced by African Americans as a result of their encounters with racism. (Author/MKA)

Vocabulary acquisition traditionally has been a struggle for students with special learning needs. This study involved an eleven year old fifth grade student with learning disabilities in reading and writing and limited English proficiency. Assistive technology assistance was provided from the Franklin Language Master 6000b and Microsoft's Power…

Early care and education center directors have a whole host of reasons for printing comprehensive and informative parent handbooks. The parents of the children who attend early care and education centers have their own set of expectations and needs for information contained in parent handbooks. When these sets of needs and expectations collide, it…

A series of magnet trade books were analyzed against a validated list of magnet concepts (Barrow, 1990a) and their Flesch (1974) Readability was determined. These trade books were used to supplement a second grade unit on magnetism locally constructed from AIM's "Mostly Magnets" (1991). All trade books accurately described how like and unlike…

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…

One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on the conceptions and misconceptions of readability. The paper begins by noting that over the years, researchers in readability have had two major goals: to determine what makes written materials easy or difficult to read and comprehend, and to…

A study examined whether (1) there are untested indices of difficulty that can be used to enhance the accuracy of readability formulas, (2) the same readability formula can be used to assess the readability of text for mature and immature readers and for good and poor readers, and (3) some one model of the reading process or some synthesis of…

Designed to alert adult basic education teachers to the factors of readability and to suggest ways that some readability problems can be alleviated, this resource unit discusses the problems posed by readability formulas and suggests that teachers must both press for more readable adult texts and question intelligently the products of publishers…