i know it may sound ignorant, what is this reading at 3.4 or 4.9 etc, in my DD school they use guided reading levels (listed as A-Z)
Can somebody educate me to correlate numbers with alphabets
thanks
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
