World History
I am thinking ahead to next year and how I will use the reading tests I give my students at the beginning of the year. Since I have technology for them all my next goal is going to differentiate for them. I see differentiation as going two different ways: 1) learning type which I also have a test for if you look below 2) reading level.
The reading level tests are also in early posts. But then what. Google Documents, before it was Google Drive had a very early way to determine readability, but it is now gone.
So for example here is an article on Obama and his consideration of his legacy from the WashPost and here are the results for the reading levels and here is what grade it is at level 8 which means it is appropriate for 13 and 14 year olds. For comparison I entered in an article from the Economist and it said it was a reading level of 7 or could be read by 12 and 13 year old students. The truth is that generally any article or news magazine other than scholarly articles are going to be appropriate for your high school students - unless they test below reading levels and that is where you will have to have them look up key words. If you follow this it will also impact state exams - or at least mine which give a lot of our ESOL students problems.
- Book Recommendation: How We Learn By Benedict Carey
There aren't many books about teaching that truly excite me, but I just finished reading a book that every educator should read. How We Lean: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey details several techniques...
- The Value Added By A Great Teacher
So perhaps this is a little off the normal target of this blog, but your hard work does pay off for your students. Right now I am reading Unchartered which uses Google books to look at how language has changed over time (or at least at the point...
- Reading Strategies
One of the teachers in my department correctly pointed out that while I had a good post on judging reading levels, I did not have a way to help solve the problem since most of us cannot just send a student to a reading specialist without missing the content...
- Reading Comprehension & Learning Styles
At my school we are working on Tier 1, 2 and 3 learning which essentially asks the teacher to differentiate learning with your students who are not meeting all of your objectives. Two main items that we are looking at are learning styles and reading comprehension....
- Reading Critically
Next Monday I am teaching a three hour course for AP students on preparing them for this fall (well for us in VA it is fall since we do not see kids until Sept 7th!). One of the things I will concentrate on will be reading for understanding. Well...
World History
How to Determine the Reading Level of a Document
The reading level tests are also in early posts. But then what. Google Documents, before it was Google Drive had a very early way to determine readability, but it is now gone.
- You can do it in Microsoft Word, but if you don't use Word
- The easiest site to use is this one and it tells you the reading level.
- Here is a great page that lets you insert a url and it even tells you how to calculate the level if say you are using a paper document (although in that case I would try to find it on Google books and just use the url finder). While this site gives the scores for three reading level tests it does not tell you what approximate grade it is read at.
- Here is a way to hand calculate it for Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog Index, SMOG Index, Fry Readability Formula, and Coleman-Liau Indexs.
So for example here is an article on Obama and his consideration of his legacy from the WashPost and here are the results for the reading levels and here is what grade it is at level 8 which means it is appropriate for 13 and 14 year olds. For comparison I entered in an article from the Economist and it said it was a reading level of 7 or could be read by 12 and 13 year old students. The truth is that generally any article or news magazine other than scholarly articles are going to be appropriate for your high school students - unless they test below reading levels and that is where you will have to have them look up key words. If you follow this it will also impact state exams - or at least mine which give a lot of our ESOL students problems.
- Book Recommendation: How We Learn By Benedict Carey
There aren't many books about teaching that truly excite me, but I just finished reading a book that every educator should read. How We Lean: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey details several techniques...
- The Value Added By A Great Teacher
So perhaps this is a little off the normal target of this blog, but your hard work does pay off for your students. Right now I am reading Unchartered which uses Google books to look at how language has changed over time (or at least at the point...
- Reading Strategies
One of the teachers in my department correctly pointed out that while I had a good post on judging reading levels, I did not have a way to help solve the problem since most of us cannot just send a student to a reading specialist without missing the content...
- Reading Comprehension & Learning Styles
At my school we are working on Tier 1, 2 and 3 learning which essentially asks the teacher to differentiate learning with your students who are not meeting all of your objectives. Two main items that we are looking at are learning styles and reading comprehension....
- Reading Critically
Next Monday I am teaching a three hour course for AP students on preparing them for this fall (well for us in VA it is fall since we do not see kids until Sept 7th!). One of the things I will concentrate on will be reading for understanding. Well...