A.R. Quiz List

Accelerated Reader Program

Readability Levels

The Renaissance Company develops a variety of testing materials, and chief among them is their Accelerated Reading Program (AR) used by our students in grades 2-8. The company uses three levels when matching books to students. The first two levels refer to a book; the third refers to a student.

1. Readability level, or book level, measures the textual difficulty of a book and is determined by a readability formula such as ATOS. Readability formulas use objective measurements to analyze text and predict which materials can be comprehended by individual readers.

Example - 2.1 or 5.0.

Please understand that this number in NO WAY relates to grade level.

2. Interest level refers to the sophistication and maturity level of a book’s content,

ideas and themes. These levels are based on publisher recommendations about the content. These levels are divided into three categories:

LG for lower grades

MG for middle grades

UG for upper grades

For example, The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, has an ATOS readability level 4.7  and an upper grade (UG) interest level indicating the content is suitable for older students.

3. Reading level measures the most difficult level of text a student can comprehend based on standardized tests or results from Accelerated Reader Reading Practice Quizzes. Although a student can read a book, the content may not be suitable for him.

We used the Star Reading Test to determine the readability range of each student. Books that are outside of this range may be too challenging or too easy for the student.

ABOUT ATOS

ATOS - Advantage-

  Touchstone Applied Science Associates, Inc. (TASA).

  Open    

  Standard

The ATOS for books formula is based on extensive research on:

    * the characteristics of text that most heavily influence readability
    * the world’s largest data base of words used in actual books (more than 30,000 books comprising nearly 500 million words)
    * comprehension statistics from 30,000 reading almost a million books

Search for Quizzes