May 2008 — News
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Study Reveals What Kids Are Reading for School
Meanwhile, the "book level" as a measure determined based on the ATOS Readability Formula for Books started falling below grade level in the sixth grade on average for the top-20 books read by students (at 5.9, indicating reading level of grade 5, month 9), falling further behind as grades progress. In both seventh and eighth grades, students were reading at an average of 6.2 for the top-20 books read. This declined to 6.1 for grades 9 through 12. The reading lists for grades 7 through 12 were virtually identical year by year, though the order of the popularity of the books changed at each grade.
When asked how this could be accounted for, Roy Truby, senior vice president of State & Federal Programs at Renaissance Learning (who also wrote the overview to the report), said: "This is an interesting question. Because there are 120,000 AR quizzes available, there is practically a quiz for every book in a school's library. And schools who use AR Enterprise, which all of the schools in the report did, have access to all 120,000 quizzes.
"With access to 120,000 AR quizzes, so long as the corresponding book was in the school's library, the What Kids Are Reading report suggests that kids aren't necessarily choosing low level books, but rather that the readability level of most books available 'flatten out' at about the sixth-grade level.
"As we show on PDF page 17 of the report, even the readability of newspapers and magazines doesn't go any higher than 7.8 years--and those are the Washington Post and New York Times. USA Today's readability level is 6.6."
(It should be noted that newspaper journalists intentionally "dumb down" their writing to what they perceive, probably correctly, to be the average reading level of their audience--i.e. the American population--aiming for something between third- and eighth-grade levels using various measurements, such as Flesch-Kincaid. See this post of an internal memo from the Cleveland Plain Dealer for more. This doesn't mean the writing is designed to be poor; it means its designed to require little literary equipage to get through, as opposed to stories that use, for example, words like "equipage" and whose authors were not journalism majors.)
Another possible explanation is that at higher grade levels, Accelerated Reader is being used largely for remediation, although this isn't clear. Renaissance Learning's Truby told us that the information in the report spans all classes and couldn't be broken down by remedial, honors, or general classes. In the sample, however, only 0.14 percent of students in grade 12 in the data made the top 10 percentile in the STAR Reading National Percentile Rank, a far smaller percentage than seen in lower grades.
