DD is 11 (yr 7) and has been having lots of assessments since starting school. She's always been a good reader and I've always encouraged her to read whatever she's interested in.
She came home a couple of weeks ago buzzing that she has a reading age of 15 years and 10 months! Obviously that's good as it's much higher than her actual age, but it made me wonder what this actually means and how high do reading ages go? they have been told they will receive merits when they're reading improves but I'm thinking that for DD there probably isn't much room for improvement.
The school have recently introduced the accelerated reader scheme and when DD did the test she was told she should read books up to level 12.6 (her ZPD). She didn't have much explaination on this so I looked it up online to see what it meant. I had assumed it refered to reading age but apparently this means she should be reading at the level of an American 12th grade student!! Surely at 11, she can't read the same books as a 17 year old?? I would be worried about inappropriate content! I've been looking on their system and can't make much sense of it so was wondering if anyone had any experience of this system.
DD's english teacher is away at the moment so I can't ask her. I've just told DD to continue reading whatever she wants and not worry about the scheme for now.