Ar reading level

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With 2 out of my 3dc finished or nearly finished primary school, you would think I might understand reading levels but I have no idea. Over the years various numbers from 3.2 up to around 10.6 have been mentioned which I just assumed was normal levels and congratulating them when their levels increased but essentially paid little attention to the meaning of these levels. However today dc2 came home and said something about being 16.2. To me this seemed a very high number which lead to a Google search, which gave me nothing. Anyone else got any more on what these mythical AR numbers mean?

I think an AR age translates to year group by adding 1 and then the number of months

So an AR of 4.1 would imply that a child is reading at the level of year 5 - 1 month into the academic year.

16.2 confuses me though as this would suggest a reading age of a year 17?! 🙈

DD’s reading levels when she was in pre-reception upto Y2 used to be explained as ‘actual reading age’ so 10.5 was what a typical 10 and a half year old would be expected to know. If you were 6 and got 10.5 you were doing really well, if aged 9 and got 7 maybe struggling.

I vaguely remember (DD is about to head off to Uni so this was a while ago…) that the level had a max though and only went upto 12 or 13 as it was designed for primary school assessment. There should be some sort of a key or explanation sent with the report??? Schools may well have their own method.

The first number is the American grade, which is the English school year minus one, and the second number is the number of months that have passed in that year. So you'd expect an average child in at Easter in Year 4 to be able to read at about 3.6/3.7. I don't think I've ever seen a child's AR level be assessed at over 8 but that may be a reflection of the pupils I worked with.

Renaissance Place are rather coy about the way the levels are calculated but I was told that they cut the spines off books and feed them into an OCR device, so it has to be some combination of word length, sentence length and sentence complexity.

The high levels tend to be by older authors, such as Austen, Dickens and Hardy, who use a lot of colons and semicolons where modern writers would use full stops, and non-fiction books that use long words. Most modern popular adult books are around level 6 - 8. Wolf Hall is only 5.6. I used to tell readers that once they were getting 100% in quizzes for books over level 5 they could read anything they liked as long as they didn't consistently choose simple books, because they were pretty much at adult literacy levels and it becomes more about reading a broad variety of books for pleasure.

AR is useful for helping children to choose books at the right level for their skills so they neither coast nor struggle and the quizzes check that they're actually understanding what they read. If you'd like to check on a book's level you can use AR Bookfinder. The advanced option lets you tailor a search to your child's level and interests.

@ThatLibraryMiss has explained it all!

AR was invented in the US therefore it uses American school grades.
Kn our school we assess reading age up to Y8 and have quite a lot who Conor out at 15/16 yo level.