You may have noticed that most of the reading passages on this website now contain readability scores. These scores should provide teachers and students with some guidance with selecting appropriately leveled texts.
Accessing the Scores
Just hover your cursor over the text that states “Suggested reading level for this text…” A pop up box should appear with a detailed breakdown of the text’s readability score. You may have some difficulty accessing this breakdown on mobile devices, although it seems to work well on iOS. I was not able to provide scores for the figurative language and author’s purpose resources as well as a few others as the scores for those assignments were misleading and did not accurately reflect that readability of the content, but these scores have been added to almost all other reading materials.
How the Scores are Derived
I have processed the texts through an opensource project called Text-Statistics. This project is hosted at this website.
Each text has been evaluated using the following algorithms.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
Gunning-Fog Score
Coleman-Liau Index
SMOG Index
Automated Readability Index
A grade level score is produced from each measure and these scores are averaged. I have suggested that each assignment is appropriately leveled for students two grades above and below this grade level average. There are some shortcomings to this method, however, and there is no replacement for adequate oversight and familiarity with your students. Nonetheless, I think this new addition will help teachers better match these resources with the needs of their students.
