The Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) is a procedure widely used in the United States with which teachers determine the reading level of children from kindergarten to grade 8; it is published by Pearson. Children read levelled texts aloud and answer questions about them, and the assessment covers aspects such as fluency and comprehension. The result is a reading level that guides the choice of suitable books and support measures.
Reading level indicates the level of reading ability a text requires or a person has reached. Depending on the system, it is expressed as a school grade, a value on a scale such as Lexile, or a level in curricula and language frameworks, such as A2 or B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference. In practice, it helps tailor texts to the intended audience, for example customer information in plain language.
The Lexile Framework for Reading is a system developed by the US company MetaMetrics that measures both a person's reading ability and a text's difficulty on the same scale. Values are given with an “L”, such as 850L; a text is a good match when its value is close to the reader's. It is based mainly on sentence length and word frequency. The system is widely used in schools and publishing, particularly in English-speaking countries.
Readability describes how easily a text can be read and understood. It depends on sentence length, word length, technical terms, sentence structure and layout, and can be approximated with formulas such as the Flesch index or LIX. Good readability matters for customer communication, instructions, websites and accessible content. Formulas only offer guidance, however; whether a text is clear ultimately depends on its audience.
In readability research, grade level is a measure of the school year from which a text is generally understood. A well-known example is the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, which calculates a US school grade from sentence length and syllables per word; a score of 8 roughly corresponds to eighth grade. Such scores transfer only partly to other languages, so adapted formulas such as Amstad's version of Flesch or LIX are often used for German.
