Jono
Imagine building a whole business on saying "yeah reading level is just the length of words and sentences, you can just average that over a whole text".
Like how the hell are you saying Hemingway is sometimes below Charlotte's Web, but also just above Twilight? Maybe impressive for 1988 when serious compute power is nowhere, but today it shouldn't be a paid API
Mar 26 at 2:42pmBuffer
Show threadJonoMar 26
It's like even a feature of Word now to estimate reading level. There's no way it's a hard calculation https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/get-your-document-s-readability-and-level-statistics-85b4969e-e80a-4777-8dd3-f7fc3c8b3fd2
Get your document's readability and level statistics - Microsoft Support

See the reading level and readability scores for documents according to the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease tests.

Show threadJonoMar 26
@jon_dog This video is some weird propaganda, why are you talking to students about the districts' goals. Later on there's the line "the energy in the classroom was incredible" and they look bored as fuck lmao https://www.canva.com/design/DAG2pB-dcU8/sqabRfxjFjPPpzt2ngQKLg/watch?utlId=hac75383444
Show threadJonoMar 26
@jon_dog While it's funny to label a kid as only being able to be a pro wrestler or a Disney cast member, it's cruel to put up scores in front of the whole class, it is prime bullying material.
This typology of scores is also feeling like Myers-Briggs type shit
Show thread Kale Mar 26
@jon_dog Lexile, eh?
Show thread Kale Mar 26
@jon_dog haha, hadn't looked at the image. Yeah, I had copilot make me a script for... Basically this. It's a nice thing to add to a prompt like 'write me a training example for pretrain, lexile 800' or whatever
Show threadJonoMar 26

@DarkestKale Reading levels have their uses, MetaMetrics' original Lexile system just seems too simplistic.

A weird thing I stumbled on was "the most common trigrams from textbooks" and look at all "the United States" and "unit unit unit" https://hub.lexile.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/21stCenturyPhraseListA11y.pdf

Ultimately they make bank off of selling this system as a technofix to state education departments wanting a no hassle objective measure of reading ability