This digest describes some of the problems researchers face in communicating educational research data to general, nonresearcher audiences. Accessibility is one problem. Most research on effective educational practices does not filter down to the people who contribute or control funding. Another problem is that of readability. In the rare event…

A study examined teachers' opinions as to what makes children's magazines good as well as which magazines they are currently using in their classrooms and in what ways magazines are being used. Subjects, 10 (of 19) experienced third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers at P.S. 106 in the Bronx, New York City, responded to a questionnaire concerning…

Theory indicates that a fourth, the emergent, reading level may be even more important in understanding the process of reading development than the three previously designated levels: the independent level, at which students have no difficulty reading on their own; the instructional level, at which students need assistance; and the frustration…

A study investigated how comprehension, as measured by the accuracy and speed of performance, is affected by the information contained in a set of procedural instructions. Using instructions that were varied with respect to the mode of presentation (pictures, text, or pictures and text) and the degree of explicitness of operational information, 68…

Two methods for aiding social studies students in developing better reading skills are suggested. The cloze and maze techniques are completion tests requiring the reader to insert words through multiple choice or from the surrounding context of the sentence. (JR)

Findings stress the importance of the teacher's role in influencing learning in the community college. (RB)

A syntactic density instrument was devised to determine how children use specific syntactic structures in their oral and written language. (JH)

This report is a guide for the maintainer or developer of the computerized comprehensibility system (CCS), a system that uses techniques and results from artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology to critique the comprehensibility of a technical document. The purpose of this report is to allow the qualified programmer to rapidly understand…

This study asked participants to rate models of computer-generated text on the perceived ease with which it could be read and studied. These ratings were submitted to a Q-mode factor analysis to identify the underlying criteria used when the reader/perceiver formed a judgment related to the "study-ability" of the text model. Subjects…

A study examined the general structure of children's information books and their use of language. A corpus of over 110 information books was examined for (1) obligatory elements of the genre, (2) optional elements, (3) iterative or repeating elements, (4) elements with fixed orders of occurrence in relation to other elements, and (5) elements with…

Features are discussed that are critical to the comprehension of texts and that readability formulas cannot handle. The critique and alternative analyses are confined to public and institutional documents and are based on research in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Two types of comprehensibility complications are examined, those…

A formula for assessing style is described and applied to compositions written by adult students of English as a second language. Style is defined as the total effect of what is done by a writer in the composing process, including choice of words, organization, and sentence and paragraph strategies. Earlier attempts to quantify style are reviewed.…

A study was conducted to define the linguistic and discourse parameters of text difficulty from the point of view of both the reader and the text in order to redefine readability and to provide an operational way of explaining processing difficulties of the near-mature reader. Subjects were 14-year-old students in the United States and the United…