Intended for teachers, this focused journal issue contains separate rationales for teaching books that have been challenged as appropriate instructional materials. Following a discussion of the purpose for rationales and suggestions for using them, the journal presents rationales for teaching the following books: "To Kill a Mockingbird,""The Diary…

Readability formulas can be useful tools in accomplishing their primary purpose--to give very general estimates of difficulty. Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding regarding their use, which has resulted in misuse and abuse. The formulas were designed to be applied post hoc to existing materials. They were not intended to…

The purposes of this study were: (1) to investigate the general interests and the reading interests of pupils in first grade through third grade and (2) to investigate teachers' skills in interpreting interest data and in choosing literature for children. The sample consisted of 521 pupils and 18 teachers. Reading interests of the children were…

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) is a national, nonprofit organization designed to motivate children to read by making a wide variety of inexpensive books available to them and allowing the children to choose and keep books that interest them. This annual report for 1977 contains the following information on the RIF project: an account of the…

This statement, prepared by the National Council of Teachers of English, addresses the increasing problem of censorship in the public schools in the form of pressure to restrict or deny students access to certain books or periodicals deemed objectionable by individuals or groups on moral, political, religious, ethnic, racial, or philosophical…

A study conducted to determine user acceptability of cassette braille systems addressed three concerns: (1) user reaction to the basic concept of cassette braille, (2) the determination of the strong and weak features of the cassette braille machines currently available, and (3) the determination of those features of braille machines which would…

A study was conducted to determine whether students' preferences for reading or for viewing television were related to the quality of their leisure reading choices. The families of 198 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students were asked to complete television and reading logs for four weeks. Sixty-six students were identified from this sample as…

Intended for use as a tool in evaluating and expanding library collections and as an aid for giving reading guidance to children, this annotated bibliography contains over 13,000 recommended titles for readers in preschool through grade 6. The titles are listed alphabetically by author under a variety of subject areas, including the following: (1)…

Serving as the basis for the first administrative complaint alleging sex discrimination in textbooks to be filed under federal law, the findings presented in this report are based on an analysis, made by parents and citizens in a midwestern city, of 12 texts in the elementary reading program of a major publisher. Generally, the findings are stated…

Adults who wish to help children come to terms with loss from death, divorce, and other separations have a good ally in books. While not a complete cure, bibliotherapy can help children cope with loss by engaging the emotions and freeing them for conscious and productive use. Numerous books have appeared for children to read, enjoy, and use in…

This paper discusses the role of reading in the lives of high school students and discusses research that suggests ways to motivate adolescents to read. Research reviewed in the paper indicates that the major factors that influence adolescent reading are gender, age or maturity, intelligence, and socioeconomic background. The summary of the…

A study was undertaken (1) to determine if a relationship existed between preadolescents' levels of reading comprehension as defined by T. C. Barrett's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and their levels of moral development according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stage sequence and (2) to discover if females demonstrated higher levels of reading…

This study was conducted in l978/79 to test the hypothesis that the circulation of books put in a prominent display location would increase because of the tendency of adults to select books in public libraries by browsing, rather than looking for specific titles. The circulation of all copies of a sample of ll5 titles from the adult individual…

A variety of resource documents and articles are included in this professional improvement packet that is designed to assist teachers and administrators in reducing the conditions under which censorship might occur. The documents presented are: the Indiana code laws concerning textbook adoption; the American Library Association's library bill of…

Teachers can improve students' content reading by preparing reading profiles in terms of student abilities, instructional material selection, and content learning objectives. These profiles should contain the following elements: orientation questions that give the teachers their present bearings; the identification of the readability levels of…