The Fry Readability Formula was employed to determine the reading grade levels of the eight most popular college U.S. history survey textbooks and the ten most popular Western civilization textbooks. It was discovered that the Fry readability technique could not produce consistently close findings on any single college history textbook. Indeed,…

A study was conducted to evaluate the level of difficulty of textbooks (French and Sciences) written in French for use with sixth grade students. A cloze test was administered to a sample of sixth grade students in two francophone districts in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, and the Henry readability formula was applied to the same texts.…

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…

Offers a critique of existing methods of assessing the human interest of basic writing textbooks, contending that most are abstract and subjective and that the more objective Flesch formula inflates texts' human-interest level. Advocates modifying existing formulas and guidelines. Suggests criteria (e.g., appropriateness of readability level) for…

This documents consists of 12 issues of a journal that seeks to provide information and reviews concerning social studies textbooks; each issue consists of 16 pages. Contents in the 12 issues include: (1) California control over textbook content; (2) "skills" teaching in elementary-level social studies texts; (3) readability formulas;…