Lists the recipients of the first IRA Literacy Award and presents comments made by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, Director-General of UNESCO, on the state of literacy in the world today. (MKM)

The UNESCO International Bureau of Education comments on the relationship between national and international education, discusses suggestions for international textbook centers, and lists 14 English-language journals that are sources of information on comparative education. (MKM)

Notes that major trends and characteristics of youth literature in the Federal Republic of Germany today are reflected in best selling books dealing with one of the following topics: terrorism; minorities and other outsider groups; the career world; and personal psychological conflicts intertwined with social issues. (MKM)

By classifying questions asked into categories of form, content, and affect, this analysis interprets Alan Purves' 1979 reanalysis of student responses to literature in a 1973 study. Notes that students emphasized form when viewing literature in the abstract, but that they looked at individual stories in terms of content and affect. (MKM)

A letter from Thomas Sticht, written while conducting research for the United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, compares the learning situations of classrooms in schools and in battalions. (MKM)

Describes research conducted in France on text readability and suggests that readability formulas give high scores to redundant texts that have no great interest and penalize texts with original information. Argues that a coefficient should be incorporated into readability formulas that reflects the nature of the text. (MKM)

Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu examines the academic failure of minority groups within the context of American society and draws comparisons to minority group education in five other cultures. (MKM)