Methods of assessing Reading Age
Subjective assessment has been shown to be inaccurate, with teachers (perhaps because of their reading competence and familiarity with the subject) usually under-estimating the difficulty of the text (by up to 8 years).
There are four main methods of objective assessment:
A. Question and answer technique
Pupils of different ages are given the text to read. They are then questioned to gauge the level of comprehension and hence determine the reading age. This is usually unrealistic for practising teachers.
B. Sentence completion (the 'cloze' technique)
Sentences are taken from the text and every nth word is deleted. Often, n=5. These sentence completion exercises are then given to the pupils to test comprehension and gauge the reading age. Graham [7] and Mobley [8] have given details of how cloze tests can be applied to science texts. This method is also time-consuming.
C. Comparison of text with a standard word list
The percentage of words not included in the Dale word list is determined and the reading age calculated from this. Well-known examples are the Dale-Chall [9] and Spache [10] tests. Again, this method is tedious.
D. Calculations involving the sentence length and number of syllables
Objective measures of readability are now widely used. They are formulae (or graphs) which are based on an enormous amount of research evidence.
A readability formula predicts the reading level of the text. This is expressed as a chronological age and is accurate to about ± one year.
The reading level (reading age) predicted indicates that an average reader of that age could just cope with the text (but see the comments in point 3 of the final summary).