Reading A-Z Leveling

Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell, and DRA levels are not official levels assigned to Reading A-Z books by those leveling systems. Rather, those levels are approximate correlations based on a comparison of attributes in Reading A-Z leveled books with equivalent books that have been assigned official levels by Fountas & Pinnell, Reading Recovery, and DRA. 

In the process of creating Reading A-Z leveled books, an extensive list of criteria and book attributes was developed for each level. These criteria were based on an analysis of published books that had been officially leveled using Fountas & Pinnell and Reading Recovery leveling criteria, as well as other factors that are known to affect text difficulty. 

Next, both the text of Reading A-Z books and books assigned official levels by Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell were entered into a computer. Objective criteria such as total word count, high frequency word count, low frequency word count, sentence length, word length, number of different words, and other factors were entered into a mathematical formula. These factors were weighted according to their importance at each level. This analysis yielded a numerical value for each book, as well as ratios such as high frequency words to total words and different words to total words.

In addition to objective measures, subjective criteria such as picture support, concept difficulty, sentence complexity, and other factors were analyzed by a trained leveling specialist. These factors were also assigned numerical values and entered into the mathematical formula. Each book was assigned a total numerical value that was used to correlate Reading A-Z books with other leveling systems. 

Writing Reading A-Z books to pre-established criteria, along with further analysis to determine Reading A-Z correlation to other systems, ensures that Reading A-Z books are leveled consistently and with a high degree of accuracy.