How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it’s about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your “context window” is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than “The dog is brown.”, they simply can’t get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex “scene” which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler “scenes” in children’s books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
Did you start reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the instant you learned to read?
Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it’s about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your “context window” is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than “The dog is brown.”, they simply can’t get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex “scene” which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler “scenes” in children’s books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Ah I see. That makes sense.
Shit, is that why I can’t understand fuck all in Finnegan’s Wake?
This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/