Some minimum competency testing programs were created chiefly as a vehicle to improve the quality of basic skills instruction. In these programs, the tests are used to define instructional targets clearly and, thereby, enhance the quality of instruction. Few testing programs have included readability levels in their test specifications. In 1979…

The relationship between anaphoric nominal substitution and reading comprehension was studied. The Diagnostic Reading Test and the Substitution Test were administered to 80 college juniors, seniors, and graduate students in teacher certification courses, and to 92 college freshmen seeking assistance in improving their reading skills. Positive and…

The 59 books annotated in this issue are arranged under five headings: infant schools; junior schools; secondary schools; adult literacy work; and apparatus, games, and kits. The books for school-age children are further subdivided into reading and language development, fiction, and nonfiction. Each entry contains a subjective readability rating…

CALIFORNIA STATE-ADOPTED MATHEMATICS TEXTBOOKS FOR GRADES 1 THROUGH 8 WERE ANALYZED TO DETERMINE THE READABILITY LEVELS, THE AMOUNT OF EXPOSITORY AND STORY-PROBLEM READING REQUIRED, AND THE FREQUENCY OF MATHEMATICS VOCABULARY USED. READABILITY WAS DETERMINED THROUGH THE DALE-CHALL FORMULA AND THE FINDINGS OF AN EARLIER STUDY USING SPACHE'S…

WORD COUNTS WERE MADE TO COMPARE THE VOCABULARIES IN READING, HEALTH, SCIENCE, AND ARITHMETIC TEXTBOOKS FOR GRADES ONE TO THREE. COUNTS WERE MADE IN SEVEN DIFFERENT BASIC READING SERIES AND IN THREE DIFFERENT SERIES IN EACH OF THE THREE CONTENT AREAS. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE WORD COUNTS ARE SPECIFIED. FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE WAS USED TO ANALYZE THE…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

A study investigated the appropriateness of the "Star Trek" book series for use as recreational reading material for elementary school children. The 12 books were adapted from the television series by James Blish. Appropriateness was determined by evaluating the quality and the readability levels of the books. Quality was ascertained by examining…

A survey of 210 professional communicators measured their sensitivity to the problem of readability, especially as it has been treated in the plain English movement (the drive to improve written materials and to make the unreadable readable). The results of the survey showed that 23% of the communicators rated the plain language concept…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BASAL READER FROM ITS BEGINNINGS IN THE LATE 1700'S TO ITS STATUS IN THE GRADED SCHOOLS OF TODAY IS SURVEYED. THE MCGUFFEY READERS ARE CITED AS THE FIRST CAREFULLY GRADED SERIES OF ONE READER FOR EACH GRADE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. SINCE THEN, CHANGES IN CONTENT, TYPOGRAPHY, IN QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF ILLUSTRATIONS,…

THE READABILITY OF ANY BOOK IS DETERMINED BY WORDS AND SENTENCES WHICH ARE USED AND WHICH VARY IN DIFFICULTY FROM EASY TO HARD. PRESENTED HERE IS A PROCEDURE BY WHICH TEACHERS CAN DETERMINE THE READABILITY INDEX OF ANY BOOK AND TRANSLATE THE INDEX TO GRADE LEVELS. THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF READABILITY FORMULAS AND WORD LISTS ARE…

The importance of content-relevant pictures in the comprehension of the main idea of a paragraph was investigated. Various reading conditions were constructed which contained a paragraph, a picture, or both, each with three types of instructions. In addition, the effects of paragraph readability, student grade placement (grade 3 and 6), and sex…

General information about the cloze technique and summaries of experiments with adults and children in which it was used are presented. Results indicated that the most valid and reliable cloze test for measuring passage difficulty is one in which (1) an every nth mechanical mutilation system is used, (2) not more than 20 words in every 100 are…

Many typographers have already decided that sans serif type is more pleasing to readers and more functional than traditional roman type. The findings of this study, which was designed to assess the readability of, and reader preference for, these two styles, lead to the opposite conclusion. To determine preferences, 200 subjects of various ages…

To determine whether poor readers can predict as well as good readers when they read easy material and to determine the effect of material difficulty on predictive ability, a study involving 140 tenth and eleventh graders was conducted. The subjects were randomly selected, with 70 good readers chosen from students who scored at stanines 7, 8, or 9…