Flesh Kincaid Reading Level

[jz]

HELP!!! I am an instructor at a local community college and am having my
students do a stats project on reading level of Time magazine articles. We
are copying and pasting parts of the articles from our sample into Word and
recording the Flesh Kincaird reading level. What we are finding is different
versions of Word are returning different reading levels for the same
passage!! For example on one passage , Word 2003 gave a 15.6, and when I
used Word 2007 it came back as a 16.8. One student using Word XP
Professional 2002 can only get as high as a 12.0. The formula for reading
level in the Help section is consistent for all versions. I would appreciate
any and all insight into this problem. Thanks!

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Try installing the latest version (Flesh 2.0) on all PCs:
http://flesh.sourceforge.net/

Also, make sure you have the latest Java installed on all PCs:
http://java.com/en/download/manual.jsp

Note: you should uninstall all older Java versions before installing the latest version.


HELP!!! I am an instructor at a local community college and am having my
students do a stats project on reading level of Time magazine articles. We
are copying and pasting parts of the articles from our sample into Word and
recording the Flesh Kincaird reading level. What we are finding is different
versions of Word are returning different reading levels for the same
passage!! For example on one passage , Word 2003 gave a 15.6, and when I
used Word 2007 it came back as a 16.8. One student using Word XP
Professional 2002 can only get as high as a 12.0. The formula for reading
level in the Help section is consistent for all versions. I would appreciate
any and all insight into this problem. Thanks!

 

[jz]

Carey,
Thanks for your response. I need to clarify. The reading level is
calculated from outside of Word? Are these the only two things that could be
affecting these results? Is there any way to tell what version of Flesh the
computer currently has? My students have already collected thier data and
I'm trying to determine if we can use data that would have been generated
with the same version.(s)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't know whether the Flesch-Kincaid implementation has changed since
Word 2002, but apparently it changed between Word 2000 and 2002, as
evidenced in "Flesch readability statistics in Word 2002 may differ from
Flesch readability statistics in Word 2000" at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=267964

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi JZ,

I'm assuming that to test the differences in 'scoring' you have a standard
sample text to check?

As Suzanne mentioned, Word 2002's values can be lowe than those of Word
2000, as Word 2002 increased the number of rules it could use to find the
Flesch Reading Ease level. In that article,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/267964 the sample sentence (in the box)
returns a grade level of "0.9" in Word 2003 and in Word 2007 and Reading
Ease Level of 94.5. Surprisingly 94.5 is the value that the article shows
Word 2000 calculated before the Word 2002 'improvement' was put into play
(The feature was later 'adjusted' by an Office XP/2002 update
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888510)

In Word 2003 there was a bug that did some counts incorrectly. You may want
to try the manual 'check' approach on one document to see if the Word 2003
version being used to process the 'score' is with or without the fix.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888508 .

In your scenario, using a common, external tool,such as what Carey
suggested, if that can be installed on the computers, could give a
consistent basis for the evaluation if you're going down the 'trust the
computer' for this <g>. The 'Flesh 2.0' utility is version 2 of that
product, not an indication of the version of Flesch calculation formula
used. There are also on line Flesch-Kincaid evaluation tools, such as
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt/com.editcentral.EC/EC.html
and it gives a different value result from that of Word, while the one at
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php
shows close value to those of Word as does
http://www.addedbytes.com/readability/

=============
Carey,
Thanks for your response. I need to clarify. The reading level is
calculated from outside of Word? Are these the only two things that could
be
affecting these results? Is there any way to tell what version of Flesh the
computer currently has? My students have already collected thier data and
I'm trying to determine if we can use data that would have been generated
with the same version.(s)>>

 

[jz]

Bob,
Thank you for your response. It clarified a lot for me. Our main issue was
between 2003 and 2007. Some 2003's gave the same reading level as the 2007,
but some did not , so it must be the bug that you mentioned. Thanks for your
help!