Assessment

Edward Fry's article on "Readability vs. Leveling" shows how these two formulas are similar and different and also provides some current large-scale uses of readability formulas. First off, it is important to know what each of these terms means. Readability is the ease of comprehension because of style of writing. Leveling is selecting books to match the competencies of a reader or writer. I particularly found all the factors that go into determining readability and leveling scores interesting. 

Readability, traditionally, is based on two measures: Syntactic difficulty, which is measured by sentence length, and Semantic difficulty, which is measured by word length such as syllables or the number of letters. I really found it interesting that readability formulas can be done by computers through typing in a passage or scanning in a whole book. Readability provides fairly accurate comparisons of books and helps to make a match between a text and the reading ability of an individual student. Overall, readability is objective. Leveling is less objective and involves several text support factors: content, illustrations, length, curriculum, language structure, judgment, and format. 

Here is a picture of what a readability formula on two different texts looks like:

(Source)

Of the two formulas, I feel that leveling is more appealing because I think that the text support factors it takes into consideration are more in depth than the measures of readability. For instance, leveling takes into account the background and experience of the reader whereas readability does not. As we have learned so far in this course, background information is extremely important when teaching students to read. 

While leveling does have it cons in comparison to readability, both of these formulas seek to help teachers to select books for their students. The use of either of these reading formulas will help students have a successful learning experience.

1. Which formula do you like the best?
2. Do you remember if your teachers used readability formulas in your classrooms or leveling formulas?