There are a number of leveling systems, such as Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell and Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), which tend to be used more often for beginning readers.

Leveling is more subjective and considers page layout, illustrative support, vocabulary and overall text length, structure and genre. If readability is the science, leveling might be considered the art of assessing reading difficulty. What’s the difference between readability and leveling? Matching a reader to a text requires not only an understanding of the difficulty of the text, but also the sophistication of the characters, situations, issues and plot lines. Just because a book is written at Grade 2 reading level doesn’t mean that the content or vocabulary will be suitable for seven-year-olds. However, the extensive research base behind readability suggests that these calculations are a good starting point for assessing the reading difficulty of a text.īut reading level is not the same as grade-level appropriateness. Of course, any readability formula that is based on word and sentence lengths has its flaws for example, single-syllable words such as brusque or schism may be more difficult to read than holiday or transportation. How accurate are grade-level readability scores? HIP editors analyze the readability of every page because we know that even a few challenging pages can boggle an already reluctant reader. Many publishers will provide an average readability score for an entire book this means that potentially there will be some pages that are much more difficult than others. Measuring the reading difficulty, or “readability” of every title is an important part of HIP’s editorial process. HIP is a also partnered with the Lexile Framework, a proprietary system of measuring difficulty of reading materials. High Interest Publishing has used several research-based formulas to come up with a system that provides grade-level readability for all of its novels. Each is a little different, but all use some form of mathematical calculations based on the length of words and the length of sentences, on the assumption that longer words and sentences make for more difficult reading. There are several readability formulas – Fry, Flesch-Kinkaid and Dale-Chall, to name a few. The process of determining the ease or difficulty of a text is called “readability.” As you can see by the image on the left, from, there are many factors that impact the readability of a text for a particular reader at a particular time, ranging from the reader’s motivation and physical environment to the appearance and layout of the text.

Flesch readability scale book