Many students from elementary school through college encounter difficulty understanding their science textbooks, regardless of whether they have language disorders. This article discusses some of the particular difficulties associated with science text comprehension and possible remedies for facilitating and enhancing comprehension of challenging…

The usefulness of a readability formula as a technique for evaluating the reading levels of abstracts was investigated using the abstracts published in "Research in Education." (Author/PF)

Reports that the writing of textbooks, once the domain of professional educators, has increasingly become a field for professional writers and journalists. (RB)

Reports the results of evaluating 15 college catalogs using the Fry readability formula; 73 percent of the catalogs had readability levels at or above grade 17 suggesting that colleges need to adjust their materials to a younger audience. (Author/WD)

Summarizes a report noting that although federal regulations require that summary plan descriptions (SPDs) of pensions must be written at low readability levels, both the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) regulating such plans and a mandatory statement for inclusion in SPDs are written at an exceptionally difficult college level.…

Examines the relationship between advertising copy readability and advertising effectiveness. Finds that recall is improved when the copy style is either fairly easy or fairly hard to read. Suggests the value of considering copy readability as a potential contributor, though a minor one, to the success of magazine advertising. (RS)

Traces the career of Jack Stenner. Stenner made the empirical discovery that observable readability could be entirely predicted from word familiarity and sentence length, and applied this "Lexile Framework"(R) to books and readers. Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework as a way to target specific readers. (SLD)

This article describes the development and validation of a short version of the Index of Race-Related Stress - Brief Version (IRSS-B). The IRRS-B is a 22-item, multidimensional measure of the race-related stress experienced by African Americans as a result of their encounters with racism. (Author/MKA)

Early care and education center directors have a whole host of reasons for printing comprehensive and informative parent handbooks. The parents of the children who attend early care and education centers have their own set of expectations and needs for information contained in parent handbooks. When these sets of needs and expectations collide, it…

A series of magnet trade books were analyzed against a validated list of magnet concepts (Barrow, 1990a) and their Flesch (1974) Readability was determined. These trade books were used to supplement a second grade unit on magnetism locally constructed from AIM's "Mostly Magnets" (1991). All trade books accurately described how like and unlike…

Not too long ago, on a visit to two sixth-grade classrooms, the author saw very clearly the challenge teachers have before them when they try to differentiate reading. In both classrooms, 11-year-olds who read like fourth graders shared tables with classmates who read like the average ninth grader--a five-year span. How teachers approach this…

Early in the 20th century, educators began looking for scientific methods for matching texts with readers. Some of the best minds in education dedicated themselves to this task, including Edward L. Thorndike, William S. Gray, Ralph Tyler, Edgar Dale, Irving Lorge, and Jeanne S. Chall. The purpose of this book is to bring students of reading into…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on the conceptions and misconceptions of readability. The paper begins by noting that over the years, researchers in readability have had two major goals: to determine what makes written materials easy or difficult to read and comprehend, and to…