A study was conducted to compare students' recreational reading levels to their independent, instructional, and frustrational levels determinable with an informal reading inventory. Subjects, 20 second grade and 20 fifth grade students, were administered the Basic Reading Inventory. In addition, the school's librarian recorded titles of four books…

A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day…

The relationship was examined between the reading grade levels (RGLs) of 5797 students and their performance in 46 Navy technical training schools. All incoming students to 41 Navy Class "A" schools and 5 Basic Electricity and Electronics strands were administered the Nelson-Denny Reading Comprehension Test and a learning strategies…

Readability in distance learning, the cloze procedure as a means of assessing readability, and the preparation of distance learning materials are addressed in the following 14 conference papers: "Some Suggestions for Improving the Reading/Comprehension Skills of Students at a Distance" (Jean Anderson); "Student Response to the…

Translating legal and bureaucratic language into plain, comprehensible English is not amenable to simple rules and procedures. Rewriting comprehensibly requires specialized knowledge about language and an awareness of a number of misconceptions and pitfalls. This paper discusses what not to do in rewriting, based upon rewritten documents presently…

This booklet presents evaluation and audit systems developed to monitor and evaluate student/program success as part of a project designed to improve program and services for disadvantaged and handicapped vocational students at Fresno City College, California. The booklet is divided into the following sections: procedures for implementing and…

This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

This report was prepared to assist the United States Army in evaluating the usefulness of readability formulas in identifying material that will be comprehended by readers at a given reading skill level. Existing readability methods and research findings were reviewed against three major criterion questions and the findings are discussed. The…

A study involving students in two English classes and two algebra classes at the College of Alameda was conducted to assess the correlation between a student's grade achievement and his/her ability to read at the level at which the course text was written. The Fry Readability Scale was used to determine the reading level of the course texts and…

The relationship between writing and reading processes can be analyzed from several contextual perspectives. The contextual perspectives may be linguistic, social, schematic, or strategic. While the writer follows several steps in getting meaning into print, the reader may not be able to reverse perfectly these steps and get meaning from print.…

This project report critiques library print materials used to support grades 10 and 11 social studies curriculum in British Columbia. The data collected are intended to provide a ready reference for school librarians when considering the particular print materials listed. Four criteria were used: readability, format and style, organization, and…

Those psychological principles which might aid the teacher in the selection of instructional materials are examined. Since learning is a process which builds sequentially on past learning, beginning reading materials should include words that have personal relevance for the individual child. Meaningful material is learned more quickly than…

This report describes the rationale and procedures for a series of studies related to reading tasks and reading texts. Children's reading tasks are examined in five strands of investigation: ability to read for meaning, ability to read for doing, ability to read for remembering, comprehension difficulties in skilled readers, and classroom…

Some practical ways to improve reading skills in social studies classes without sacrificing content objectives and goals are presented. It is emphasized that social studies teachers are best suited to teach reading skills in their own subject field. Social studies teachers need to focus on three reading skills: vocabulary development and word…

In order to utilize interesting children's trade books in a systematic reading program, two readability formulas were devised based on a selection of children's trade books. Children's scores on selections from these books and judges' rankings were compared. The judges' decisions were considered to be highly credible and were used as the criterion…