George R. Klare

George R. Klare (1922–2006) was a World War II veteran and a distinguished professor of psychology and dean at Ohio University. His major contribution was in the field of readability. From the beginning of the 20th century, the assessment of the grade level of texts for different grades of readers was a central concern of reading research. It was well known that without correctly graded texts, readers would not improve their reading skill. There were over 1,000 published studies on this topic. Klare's contribution to that effort came both in his critical reviews of the studies and his participation in original research.

Early life

George R. Klare was born April 17, 1922, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, son of George C. Klare, and Lea L. (Launer) Klare. He served as senior class president in North Bend High School in North Bend, Nebraska and graduated from that school in 1940. He received a Regents Scholarship to the University of Nebraska, where he studied before being called into the Army Air Force in 1942. He then took more college and officer training at the University of Missouri.

World War II

Following military and flight training, Klare served as a navigator on B-17 bombers in the Eighth Air Force in England. On Dec. 31, 1944, he was shot down over Germany. He spent the rest of World War II in German POW camps. He was liberated by advancing Soviet troops from Stalag Luft One on May 1, 1945. He was honorably discharged as a First Lieutenant in December, 1945, receiving the Air Medal, the Purple Heart, European area ribbons and the Prisoner of War medal.

Klare later recounted his experiences as a prisoner of war in a chapter entitled "Questions" in Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment, published by Springer in 2004. In this extraordinary account, Klare tells how he narrowly escaped death three times on January 3, 1945. While on a railroad car en route to the Luftwaffe Interrogation Center, Klare survived a friendly-fire bombing in the rail yard in Fulda, Germany, the target on this third mission one week earlier. Klare and his crew were ordered by a German guard to remove packages from the Fulda freight station that was on fire from the Allied bombing. The guard then ordered the men out of the burning building just before it collapsed. A crowd of angry German civilians soon gathered near the collapsed freight station. The German guard, who was an English-speaking Luftwaffe captain, was armed only with a pistol. Yet he managed to hold off the mob and take Klare and his crew to a safe building. "I owe my life to him,” Klare wrote. “He was the bravest man I ever saw.”

Klare remained active in veterans' issues the rest of his life. His contributions include:

• A Few Good Men.
• Veterans History Project.
• WOUB Online: WWII Veterans.
• In addition to his chapter in Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment,he published several magazine articles about the psychological effects of war. His wartime writings were reprinted in The Haunting Memories of War, a dual memoir co-authored with his son Roger.

Academic life

After World War II, Klare earned a BA degree cum laude in 1946, a MA degree in 1947, and a PhD degree in 1950 in psychology from the University of Minnesota. After working for The Psychological Corporation in New York City and the University of Illinois, he became an assistant professor of psychology in 1954 at Ohio University.

It was during that period, he published, with Byron Buck, Know Your Reader: The Scientific Approach to Readability. This work introduced to the public the extensive research behind the popular readability formulas of the likes of Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning. The book showed the average reader in America was an "adult of limited reading ability," with half the population reading below the 9th-grade level. The readability formulas could be used to select and create literature and texts of different reading levels. Without appropriately graded texts, people will not read or improve their reading skill.

His other books include Elementary Statistics (with P. A. Games), A Manual for Readable Writing, How to Write Readable English, and The Measurement of Readability. He also published 85 articles and book chapters.

Klare won a Fulbright grant to the Open University of England. He also won the Best of Show award in the Journal Article Competition of the International Technical Communication Conference in 1978 and the Oscar S. Causey Award for Outstanding Contributions to Reading Research in 1981, and was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame of the International Reading Association in 1997. He served on the editorial boards of eight journals, as well as The Literary Dictionary. He is listed in Who's Who in America and was listed in the Fourth Edition of Who's Who in the World.

In 1978, he was named Distinguished Professor of Psychology. While at Ohio University, he served as chair of the Psychology Department from 1959 to 1963, as acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1965–66 and in 1984–85, and as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1966 to 1971. He was also acting associate provost for graduate and research programs from 1986 until his retirement in 1987.

Reading research

Most of the basic research on the readability formulas was done in the first half of the 20th century. The later half was a very contentious period in reading research (especially regarding phonetics). In spite of the controversy, Klare and a few colleagues persisted and focused on:

• Consolidation and confirmation of earlier research.
• Developing new formulas and fine-tuning older ones.
• Other variables affecting readability besides the grade-level of text.
• Features of the reader affecting readability.

As the unofficial chronicler of this ongoing research, Klare published four landmark reviews, The Measurement of Readability in 1963, "Assessing Readability" in 1975 (which was named a Citation Classic by the Institute for Scientific Information), "Readability" in 1984. and "Readable Computer Documentation" in 2000.

Later, as the U.S. military invested heavily in readability research, he participated in several important studies that showed the usefulness of readability formulas in improving the 1. comprehension, 2. retention, 3. reading speed, and 4. reading persistence of technical manuals and instructional materials.

Klare also conducted or participated in research on the features of the reader that effected readability: 1. prior knowledge, 2. level of reading skill, 3. interest, and 4. motivation. In one 1976 analysis of 35 readability experiments, Klare showed how important it is to control for these variables when doing reader research.

The century ended with a more complete view of those variables affecting reading success, much of it due to Klare's efforts. Readability, it turned out, is not an absolute residing in the text, but is a product of the interaction between the reader and the text. In the text, those variables that affect readability are 1. content, 2. grade level (style), design, and organization. In the reader, the variables are 1. prior knowledge, 2. level of reading skill, 3. interest, and 4. motivation.

George R. Klare died on March 3, 2006, at his home in The Plains, Ohio, from pneumonia at the age of 83. He was survived by his wife, Julia M. Klare; a daughter, Deborah Fox of Vero Beach, Fla.; a son, Roger, and daughter-in-law, Connie Schmittauer, of Dublin, Ohio; and a daughter, Barbara, and son-in-law, Galen Fultz, of San Anselmo, Calif. He has a grandson, McCoy, and a granddaughter, Zoe, also of San Anselmo; a granddaughter, Sivan, of Portland, Ore.; and a step-sister, Dorothy Launer, of Fremont, Neb.