A study (1) surveyed the views of educators and textbook publishers regarding suitable reading levels of textbooks used for instruction in reading and content area subjects; (2) examined preferences for difficulty of reading textbooks considering students' achievement levels and for reading content area textbooks when selections are made for…

Research has shown that secondary school teachers are generally unable to rank text passages accurately according to their reading difficulty. To determine if this was true of elementary and middle school personnel, 177 teachers, administrators, and supervisors attending a summer reading workshop were asked to rank order each of five 100-word…

The increased interest in reading comprehension by researchers in fields other than reading education is noted in this paper. In addition, the concerns of the new researchers in reading are described, some of the terms they are using are explained, and the implications of their findings for reading instruction are explored. The interests of…

IN PREPARATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A GENERAL FREQUENCY WORD LIST IN GERMAN DESIGNED TO MEET THE NEEDS OF THE INTERMEDIATE AND ADVANCED LEVELS OF READING IN THE GERMAN CURRICULUM, A COMPUTER-BASED WORD COUNT WAS BEGUN IN AUSTRALIA'S UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE. USING MAGNETIC TAPES CONTAINING (1) A TEXT OF OVER 100,000 RUNNING WORDS, (2) 1,000 MOST…

Two representative samples of expository prose from sixth grade textbooks (one in science and one in social studies) were analyzed for clarity of explanation. Four text criteria were applied to the analyses: structure, unity, coherence, and audience appropriateness. The results of the analysis suggested that many children's textbooks are not…

A study was conducted (1) to discover whether using standardized headings on warranties would increase or decrease people's speed and accuracy in understanding the terms of warranties and (2) to determine what effect headings would have on people's attitudes toward warranties. Subjects were 48 adult consumers who read groups of four warranties for…

One hundred seventy-nine research reports on college and adult reading are reviewed under five major headings: (1) programs; (2) reading, study, and related habits, traits and skills; (3) influence of reading, study, and related habits and skills; (4) factors influencing reading and other study habits and skills; and (5) testing, readability,…

A course for teaching reading in the secondary school, designed for teachers both with or without previous study in the teaching of reading, is presented in outline form. The course is divided into the following five sections: reading perspectives or theory, secondary programs, assessment, classroom organization, and content-specific…

This study was designed to determine whether the content of selected beginning reading textbooks is comparable in syntactic complexity to the oral language of normal first-grade children and whether there was a predictable progression of syntactic complexity within the textbooks examined. The ten samples were taken from the primary levles of the…

This study was designed to discover the answers to two general questions concerning the instrucitonal level of reading: (1) What is the percentage of word recognition that is necessary for second and fifth graders to maintain in order to achieve a certain percentage of comprehension? (2) Are those word recognition percentages the same for both…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

In order to determine the opinions of third grade remedial reading pupils about trade books recommended in library selection aids and special series books recommended for poor readers, 57 pupils completed statements on book inventory forms about 24 picture books and 24 series books. Data was gathered on book completion, interest, and difficulty…

The material included in this annotated bibliography has been arranged in several categories: general references to cloze procedure; methodology and rationale of cloze; cloze as a measure of readability, including cloze as a criterion to establish readability levels and as a predictor of achievement; cloze as a teaching technique; cloze in English…

This book helps to alleviate the problem of finding specific books for each child by taking into consideration the child's reading abilities, interests, and personal problems. The many factors which influence children's reactions to books are spelled out as well as the effect of physical makeup and format upon children's choices. The nature of the…

The proceedings of a conference (University of Wisconsin, 1961) on the methodology and quality of handwriting research are presented in this book. After introductory remarks on current educational research, papers are presented on the following topics: (1) current (l960) teaching practices in handwriting in the United States, (2) the use of…