Readability of High School Text Passages Before and After Revision. Final Report.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether high school subject matter text which was revised on the basis of secondary school students' oral reading miscues that result in grammatical re-transformations had greater readability than the original text. The subjects, 217 students, were randomly selected and were assigned to stanine levels based on the results of the comprehension part of the Diagnostic Reading Test, Survey Section, Upper Level, Form B. A stratified subsample of 23 subjects was then selected to orally read the subject matter passages. The readings were tape recorded. The miscues were transcribed onto worksheets and analyzed according to the procedures of the Reading Miscue Inventory. An additional group of 96 ninth graders matched to the descriptive phase sample on Diagnostic Reading Test scores were randomly assigned to take one of the readability tests. Some of the conclusions indicated that (1) the oral reading of the students demonstrated that they attempted to read just the syntactical patterns of the subject matter passages in order to gain meaning and (2) the analysis of miscues revealed portions which were confusing and/or ambiguous. (Author/WR)