The Validity and Reliability of the Cloze Procedure as a Measure of Readability for Prelingually, Profoundly Deaf Students

In a previous study, it was noted that fewer than 20% of programs educating hearing-impaired students use formal procedures for making appropriate instructional matches between students and printed materials. It was speculated that teachers of deaf children are wary of readability procedures since none of them have been validated with deaf subjects. This study examined the validity and reliability of the cloze procedure as a readability measure for deaf students. The validity of the cloze procedure was examined by relating cloze scores on passages of varying difficulty with estimates of relative passage difficulty calculated by the Fry and Dale-Chall readability formulas. Although the cloze procedure was shown to be satisfactorily reliable with deaf subjects, cloze scores did not relate to the predicted passage difficulty: Therefore, the validity of the cloze procedure as a readability measure was not confirmed. It was concluded that further research is needed with other criteria of passage difficulty before the cloze procedure can be used with confidence as a readability measure with deaf students.