I have been interested in these reading level measurements for a while.
My son is now in the 6th grade and we've been carefully monitoring his
reading level for years. BC's readability scores post listed the
equations that are used to determine the "grade level" of the material
and it is easy to see that it is based purely on sentence structure and
word length. *No conceptual understanding is needed.*
Out of curiosity, I pasted in a section from one of my optics labs into
the Gunning Fog Index calculator and got 8.87. Yet, I feel comfortable
claiming that an average ninth grader is not going to understand
"ASE=Amplified Spontaneous Emission" even though they can read the
words.
One place where I saw this flaw (before I figured out the equations
used for the calculations but was already suspicious) was when my then
4th grade son brought home a book rated at the upper end of fourth grade
- Phantom of the Opera. I figured that sure, he could read it, but
would he understand the complex interplays of emotions and contexts?
Probably not. I figured that we'd wait until high school to read that.
On the other hand, a ninth grade rated version of "Swiss Family
Robinson" was easily read by him and pretty well understood when he was
only in 5th grade.
The above text rated 8.25 - don't try to get your young children to
read it... :-)
I'll bet that Hake's posting could be rewritten to get a score of 8 to
10 and be no more understandable to the non-specialist reader.
John
P.S. I very much enjoy the detail in Hake's postings and am thankful
for the references.
P.P.S. It is interesting to look at the "significant" figures in the
online Fog Index analysis. All values have 1 to 3 sig figs except the
average number of words per sentence which has an absurd 10 significant
figures listed. (Maybe OK for a population but certainly not for a
sample!)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
John E. Sohl, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Weber State University
2508 University Circle
Ogden, UT 84408-2508