Readability formulas can be useful tools in accomplishing their primary purpose--to give very general estimates of difficulty. Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding regarding their use, which has resulted in misuse and abuse. The formulas were designed to be applied post hoc to existing materials. They were not intended to…

Drawn from a symposium presented at the 1979 National Reading Conference, the four papers in this collection describe a notion of conceptual readability, an approach contrasting with traditional readability computations (number of words per sentence and degree of familiarity of individual words) and focusing on the concepts communicated by the…

The readability level of passages from three subtests of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED), Forms X-6 and Y-6, were compared with the readability level of passages selected from the Des Moines Resister, Reader's Digest, Time, Newsweek, Saturday Review, and 18 high school textbooks from the fields of social studies, science, and…

A study was designed to validate the Navy Readability Indices (NRIs) in an individualized instructional system using the criteria of comprehension and learning time. Two hundred Navy enlisted personnel enrolled in a computer-managed technical training course were tested for both comprehension and learning-time-to-criterion on four programmed…

Investigates the readability level of written materials (such as notices or newsletters) sent by six all-day kindergartens/child-parent centers to parents of disadvantaged children. Found that the readability of the materials ranged from sixth grade to higher than college level, and that the mean level was midtenth grade. (ARH)

The present findings imply that a readability formula is not an effective writing production criterion, even when the writer does not deliberately write to the formula. Comprehensibility of text might be better controlled through the proper use of the transformer concept (MacDonald-Ross and Waller). (Author/PN)

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 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…

College students can read, but they often lack the prereading and postreading skills needed to help them think about and respond to what they read. A three-step plan can help students read and understand the text more fully. The first step entails using measures of fitness to determine: (1) the grade level of the text being considered and how it…

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…

Designed to alert adult basic education teachers to the factors of readability and to suggest ways that some readability problems can be alleviated, this resource unit discusses the problems posed by readability formulas and suggests that teachers must both press for more readable adult texts and question intelligently the products of publishers…

Four readability indices that focus on the ease of comprehension of printed material are applied to industrial education textbooks for senior high school students. Grade reading levels by subject areas for the four indices are presented in tables, charts, and text. Certain conclusions about the readability techniques studied are suggested. (MF)

This paper shows how the concept of general objectivity can be used to improve behavioral science measurement, particularly as it applies to the Lexile Framework, a tool for objectively measuring reading comprehension. It begins with a dialogue between a physicist and a psychometrician that details some of the differences between physical science…

Investigates whether novelistic prose can be dated by considering marked stylistic changes that occurred over the past 240 years. Finds a positive correlation between publication date and stylistic markers of sentence length, word length, rare punctuation, and word shortening or informality. Argues that this process can form the basis for new…

As part of a continuing effort by the Indiana Department of Public Instruction to share practical, easy-to-implement reading techniques, this booklet offers a collection of teaching activities under various topics related to reading. Of the eight sections in the booklet, four deal with writing, because an anticipated outgrowth of improved skill in…