Special education elementary students (N=271) were tested on three reading passages; six readability formulas were applied to the passages. Rank orderings of the passages based on readability formulas failed to agree with those based on students' actual performance. Implications for measuring students' reading proficiency and for selecting…

The purposes of this study were to assess the usefulness of a variety of readability formulas in predicting the relative difficulty of passages, and to explore the contribution of pupils' background to text difficulty. Subjects were 285 special education students in grades 1-9, 117 of whom were based in rural and suburban Minnesota (MN) and 168 of…