Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Leveling off?

A rating of "3.4" means that the book is at a level of the 4th month of 3rd grade. The rating systems (eg Renaissance Learning and its AR Bookfinder) supposedly reflect what grades a book is suited to. They seem to assign their ratings by scanning the books, calculating mean sentence length, word length, syllables per word, and so on. You probably get the idea.

I'm dubious about these systems for a lot of reasons. Renaissance Learning calls itself a company providing "advanced technology for data-driven schools." But literature isn't data-driven or the product of "advanced technology;" it's creative and the product of an author's vision (industrial chapter books excepted, but I suppose they aren't literature). I don't like the idea of reducing literary works like Old Yeller or Huckleberry Finn to data-driven numbers for inclusion on a checklist of numerically-appropriate books to be consumed during 30 minutes of Sustained Silent Reading.

Okay, color me cynical.

That said, the system seems to work very well with those industrial chapter books I mentioned (e.g. the Daisy Meadows fairy stories). These books are probably written by committee according to a formula. There are a lot of books like that out there. In that respect, the labels can help as a rough guide to whether or not a book is at a child's reading level (though reading the first two or three pages is probably just as effective).

My son read Dune for school last year (6th grade), and AR and Lexile Levels both gave it a rating somewhere around a fifth-grade reading level. Anyone who's read Dune knows it wasn't written for fifth-graders. This kind of mismatch seems to happen more often with real books than with the industrial ones.

HTH

Val

Val, I'm jealous! My DS only got about a third into Dune and then lost interest

But at least I can report that scholoastic's website's 'book wizard'

http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tb...matchallpartial&Ne=1314&Ntt=Dune



At Lexile's website I see Dune as 800L, but Harry Potter and the Socerer's Stone at 880L - which I don't get at all!

I also found this interesting

So if your child read and understood 100% of a book, then they aren't judged to be at that Lexile level, if that makes sense...
Grinity

Dune is hard! My son only got through it because it was for a class. I had to help him at first.

Yannam,

These are grade-level equivalents. 3.4 would be third grade, fourth month. 4.9 would be fourth grade, ninth month.

Hope that helps.

I understood about number part, I know little bit about alphabets part too, but many forgot to answer about existence of any correlation tables, say if my dd is p level according to guided reading level, what is that means in numbers?

yannam - go to Scholastic's website. You can see that a "p" is somewhere in 3rd grade level. My daughter's school uses those letter levels for report cards, except that they only provide testing for a range that is 2 grades above. So, the teacher just marks the highest level attained and then makes a note "student is beyond level Q" for example.

Does that help?