Monday, April 11, 2011

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level and Calculators

So, here's something interesting: I am developing a program to assist students in reading, and as such I am looking into automated systems for determining readability/difficulty of any given text. One popular automated algorithm is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which tells you a supposed grade level of text based on word length and sentence length. Seems simple enough, right? In fact, the formula is here:


Why, then, does every Flesch-Kincaid calculator I use return different numbers... sometimes drastically different.

Microsoft Word: Flesch Reading Ease - 51.9, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 8.8
Joe's Web Tools: Flesch Reading Ease - 59.6, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 7.8
Standards-schmandards Readability Index Calculator: Flesch Reading Ease - 37, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 11 (I find this highly unlikely)
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1 comment:

  1. PhilJuly 19, 2011 at 5:52 AM

    I wonder the same thing! been looking for a calculator to pop in our CMS as we have a worldwide audience for our english language website and it's pretty important to understand how understandable we are! I'm guessing the variation is in the calculation of sylables... how can we calculate this in a formula?

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