Age Guide

These days it's relatively unlikely that you are NOT going to be able to reach out for help if you don't understand a word. So seeing a statement like: Unaided reading age 16-18 can be shocking when you intended this for an 8 year old. In full this statement means, "The average American student will understand EVERY SINGLE word in the document without any help at all."

In most cases, RDPT has come to this conclusion due to the high number of difficult words! You now have three choices:

  1. Use the highlight button and simplify as many of the difficult words as possible.

  2. Pre-teach difficult words that your students might not know. (The Word Cloud and low frequency spreadsheet generator can help you with this)

  3. Add some help into the document. E.g. Highlight the difficult words to flag them for students and add a low frequency word table with explanations of as many difficult words as possible.

Poetry

Sometimes in poetry we use line breaks rather than full stops to separate clauses. If this is the case then its possible age rating is on the high side. Check the Flesch score to see if this is causing an issue. Between the two, you should be able to get a really good feel for the true difficulty of the passage.

More info

Click on ▶ Flesch score to see more of a breakdown of what RDPT has analysed. The Coleman–Liau Reading Age is not context aware and is often lower than the Dale-Chall Readability index which is what is used for the unaided reading age.