There are three major methods of determining how readable (i.e. understandable) prose is.
1. The teacher, from experience, makes an estimate Teacher Estimates.
2. The pupil tries reading it (and a test can be used to find how well the pupil read) - Direct Assessment.
3. Someone applies a readability ...

Putting things in order is an important way of organising them. Children who can organise objects, according to colour, or size, or what they are used for, are well on the way to being able to think about organising other things, but young children have only limited ability to order ...

It is important to explore the relation between research and policy and this can be done by reviewing some of the findings of research which have focussed on transition from school. Although the subject has engaged the interests of researchers, particularly psychologists and sociologists, for many years, a sense of ...

A look at some factors in the selection and training of primary teachers, with some suggestions for a radical change in approach.

It is a cliche to talk about 'the information explosion' but it is a fact, nonetheless, that in the last 30 years or so new knowledge has been accumulating at a faster and faster rate. It took 32 years (1907-1938) for Chemical Abstracts to publish its first one million citations ...

One of the most interesting and remarkable developments in education during the 1960s and 70s was the growth of the teachers' centre movement. A British invention, it almost immediately attracted a great deal of interest from educationalists in other countries, so much so that during the 1970s, it became, according ...

In Christchurch the number of Pacific Island children is small, they live in every area of the city, from 'working class industrial' to 'middle-class suburban', and most are New Zealand-born Samoans. The families rarely shift and their children rarely change schools, at least between the ages of five and eight ...

Women are under-represented in senior positions in both the primary and the secondary teaching services. But why? Judy Whitcombe has been conducting a research project in the Department of Education's Research and Statistics Division, stimulated by the Education and the Equality of the Sexes Conference in 1975 and requested by ...

How much of a child's development is influenced by the school he attends? Barbara Maughan and Janet Ouston- two of the research workers involved in the publication of the widely acclaimed Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children- consider the question and assess the implications of their ...

An understanding of validity, reliability and usability are a must for all test users. The validity of a test is an indication of how well it measures what the author claims it will measure; its reliability describes the consistency or dependability of its scores; and its usability is concerned with ...