Designed to assess the cognitive requirement expected or implied in beginning reading materials and in their instructional suggestions and to determine whether these materials are appropriate to the cognitive development of the children who will use them, this instrument is for use by evaluators with the first reader in a basal series. It directs…

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,…

Calls for new textbooks to teach Russian literature. Complains of inappropriate wording for young people, officious and boring content, and a lack of humanistic themes in existing textbooks. Suggests that a text be compiled from among the best literary and critical articles to develop in students a love and understanding of literature. (DK)

This textbook evaluation instrument is provided to assess (1) content properties; (2) instructional properties; (3) physical properties; (4) readability; and (5) other properties such as cultural mix, organization of text, and suitability for various grade levels in secondary level world geography and global studies textbooks. For the first three…

Reports on a study of "considerateness" of five fifth-grade social studies textbooks. Identifies four elements of considerateness: (1) readability level; (2) placement of relevant pictures or illustrations; (3) use of subtitles; and (4) use of words and phrases to connect ideas within and between sentences. (CFR)

A study examined the readability of vocational horticulture instructional materials used by 40 schools participating in the 1981 Ohio Horticulture Achievement Testing Program. During the first part of the study, researchers administered a mail questionnaire to 31 teachers to identify the materials that were used most frequently, to obtain…

Readability in distance learning, the cloze procedure as a means of assessing readability, and the preparation of distance learning materials are addressed in the following 14 conference papers: "Some Suggestions for Improving the Reading/Comprehension Skills of Students at a Distance" (Jean Anderson); "Student Response to the…

Discusses the applicability of research into cognitive schemas, metacognition, instructional design, and learning strategies to textbook creation; the value of well-structured, coherent, and focused texts; readability formulas, narrative characteristics, science and social studies texts, glossaries, dictionaries, teachers' manuals, and practice…

Classroom teachers frequently express concern that textbooks and other curriculum materials are too difficult for their students. The objectives of this investigation were to develop a method for scoring the Level of Abstraction (LOA) of science reading material, and explore its relationship with certain other known methods for assessing…