I'm a bit dubious about those rating tools and tend to see them as solutions in search of problems. For example,
Accelerated Reader (AR) gave
Dune a reading level of grade 5.7. The
Lexile level for this book is also fifth grade. The interest level AR gives this book (grades 9-12) is better, but anyone who's ever read
Dune would know that it's way above a fifth grade level. Interestingly, the Lexile rating talks about "power words" in each book that "each student should know." One of the power words in
Dune was
fluffy.
Adult and
bald were two others. I can't help but wonder if Lexile was analyzing the same book I was reading:
Through Paul’s mind flashed the related knowledge, the hunter-seeker’s limitations: Its compressed suspensor field distorted the vision of its transmitter eye. With nothing but the dim light of the room to reflect his target, the operator would be relying on motion – anything that moved. A shield could slow a hunter, give time to destroy it, but Paul had put aside his shield on the bed. Lasguns would knock them down, but lasguns were expensive and notoriously cranky of maintenance – and there was always the peril of explosive pyrotechnics if the laser beam intersected a hot shield. The Atreides relied on their body shields and their wits.
Now, Paul held himself in near catatonic immobility, knowing he had only his wits to meet this threat.
Fifth grade? Seriously, I would hope that
fluffy and
bald haven't become fifth-grade power-words, and as for
compressed suspensor field? I don't even know what that means.
Tools like AR and Lexile give scores that reflect "text difficulty:"
Lexile measures are based on two well-established predictors of how difficult a text is to comprehend: word frequency and sentence length.
Frank Herbert used advanced vocabulary in
Dune and he made up umpteen words. However, he re-used them, which may explain why the book got its fifth-grade rating.
The AR and Lexile scores can be useful if you're trying to get a basic idea about a book's grade level score, but honestly, I'm not sure what kind of value that number really offers. The scores for
Henry and Mudge and the original
Nancy Drew books seem about right, but it isn't like the audiences for these books were big secrets until Lexile came along.
I tried to use AR and Lexile to find books for my kids when they were younger, but I gave up because I didn't find them to be terribly helpful. However, I'm cynical about this kind of thing and see it as an industrial approach (calculating "grade level" using a standardized algorithm) to a challenge that's very much about an individual ("What kind of books will my kid like to read?"). YMMV.
