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The scale passages were selected on the basis of the following grade-related
requirements for the reader:
- Knowledge of vocabulary
- Familiarity with sentence structure
- Subject-related and cultural knowledge
- Technical knowledge
- Density of ideas
- Level of reasoning
The selections were then tested by:
- Evaluation by several groups of teachers and administrators
- Evaluation by students of corresponding grades
- Cloze testing of students of corresponding grades
- Readability formulas (Dale-Chall and Spache)
The book also describes at length the various characteristics of each type of text
that can contribute to difficulty. An added section features samples of the design
and illustrations of books appropriate for the first four grades.
The following are three samples of the scales taken from the book.
Reading Level 3
The stars, like the sun, are always in the sky, and they are always
shining. In the daytime the sky is so bright that the stars do not show.
But when the sky darkens, there they are.
What are the stars, you wonder, and how do they twinkle?
Stars are huge balls of hot, hot gas. They are like the sun but they look
small because they are much, much farther away. They are trillions and
trillions of miles away, shining in black space, high above the air.
Space is empty and does not move. Stars do not twinkle there, but
twinkling begins when starlight hits the air. The air moves and tosses
the light around.
- From The Starry Sky: An Outdoor Science Book (Wyler 1989, pp. 15-16)
Reading Level 5-6
Black holes are probably the weirdest objects in space. They are
created during a supernova explosion. If the collapsing core of the
exploding star is large enough - more than four times the mass of our
sun - it does not stop compressing when it gets as small as a neutron
star. The matter crushes itself out of existence. All that remains is the
gravity field - a black hole. The object is gone. Anything that comes
close to it is swallowed up. Even a beam of light cannot escape.
Like vacuum cleaners in space, black holes suck up everything around
them. But their reach is short. A black hole would have to be closer
than one light-year to have even a small effect on the orbits of the
planets in our solar system. A catastrophe such as the swallowing of
the Earth or the sun is strictly science fiction.
- From Exploring the Sky (Dickinson 1987, p. 42)
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