The New Dale-Chall Readability Formula In Readability Revisited: The New
Dale-Call Readability Formula, Chall and Dale (1995) updated their list of
3,000 easy words and improved their original formula, then 47 years old. The
new formula was validated against a variety of criteria, including:
• 32 passages tested by Bormuth (1971) on 4th to 12th-grade students.
• 36 passages tested by Miller and Coleman (1967) on 479 college
students.
• 80 passages tested by MacGinitie and Tretiak (1971) on college and
graduate students.
• 12 technical passages tested by Caylor et al. (1973) on 395 Air Force
trainees.