This paper reviews seven research studies on the subject of readability. The first study reviewed is itself an extensive review of 30 readability formulas described by George A. Klare. Of these, five formulas considered to be interesting, unusual, or classic on the basis of high validity, simplicity or complexity, common or uncommon variables, and…

Intended to provide guidance for secondary school mathematics teachers who desire to maximize the reading abilities of their students and thus maximize students' performance, this report attempts to make the secondary school teacher aware of some of the difficulties encountered in reading mathematics and offers some techniques, activities, and…

Separate listings of both ongoing and completed reading research in Great Britain between 1974 and 1977--including relevant language studies and research on spelling--are arranged alphabetically by researcher, reporting the research title, the institution at which the research was conducted, the years started and completed, and the type of…

Three informal measures for determining whether students can read the assigned text material are described in this paper. The diagnostic measures are the informal textbook test, the cloze procedure, and the informal skills test. In the informal textbook test, a student is asked to read a 250 word passage selected from the textbook intended for…

Brief, two-page papers are presented on 31 educational topics of interest to community college faculty, administrators, and staff. Each paper is coded to indicate intended audience, subject category, and level of concern. The following topics are considered: (1) preferred learning style and grade achievement; (2) the community college mission; (3)…

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of sentence length, sentence structure, and word frequency on the readability of textbook prose. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which the factors, taken alone or in combination, affected the readability of two 1,000-word college textbook passages when the content remained the same. Two…

A review of the literature and an examination of the state of the technology is presented in this discussion of text analysis with computers. The computer capabilities of several available text analysis programs are reviewed, including those that examine vocabulary, word strings, sentence and syntactic complexity, and readability. (AEA)

The reading level difficulty of college recruitment literature and the ability of college-bound high school students to understand the terminology frequently used in college admissions were studied. The reading difficulty of passages from catalogs collected from 42 colleges and universities was computed using the Flesch Reading Ease Formula. A…

In a study of the readability of Air Force regulations, the writer-estimated reading grade level (RGL) for each regulation was rechecked by using the FORCAST readability formula. In four of the seven cases, the regulation writers underestimated the RGL of their regulation by more than one grade level. None of the writers produced a document with…

A summary of research on reading rate is presented. Cited studies dating from 1884 to 1965 suggest a relationship among reading rate and visual perception, practice in reading, power of concentration, mental alertness, complex reaction times, intelligence, amount of vocalization, content, rate of thinking, intensity of illumination, typographical…

A bibliography, with descriptive abstracts, of articles dealing with research on reading in the content fields is presented. The listing is divided into two parts: a bibliography from research literature which focuses on general content reading skills and an "Other Subjects" bibliography selected from literature dealing with areas other than the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between eye voice span (EVS), reading ability, and readability. Fifty average and poor third, fourth, and fifth-grade students were selected on the basis of their comprehension scores on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. They were individually tested for EVS on paragraphs ranging in…

This thesis explores some difficulties associated with the use of the cloze procedure, particularly in relation to the interpretation of an individual's score on a cloze test. Cloze tests were administered to 112 grade-six children in four schools. The results indicated that for the children in this study the easiest words to replace were those…

This study investigated the use of samples of students' writing as a means of assessing their reading achievement. Writing samples were collected from 338 students in grades seven through fourteen. Reading ability for these students ranged from below third-grade level to above fourteenth-grade level. Writing samples were categorized according to…