A Response to Kibby's Criticisms of the Rauding Scale Research
Ronald P. Carver · Reading Research Quarterly · 1975
space. Kibby uses the occasion of my article to expound upon his ideas about what readability research should focus upon. Also, he seizes the opportunity to provide the reader with a review of research. Kibby seems to justify this by contending that my research failed to take this referenced research into account. He should have pointed out how the Rauding Scale would have been affected or improved if this research had been focused upon. It is not clear what I should have done in developing the Rauding Scale that would have satisfied Kibby's tastes. Maybe he would have been satisfied if I had simply included a large number of references to earlier works that are of indirect relevance. Kibby claims that I failed to communicate to the Rauding Scale raters what I meant when I asked them to judge the difficulty of the vocabulary, ideas, and style of a passage. Kibby is wrong. Rauding Scale raters must pass the Rauding Scale Qualification Test (Carver, 1974) before they use the Rauding Scale, and on this test they receive the following instructions: