Reading Age

[Poida]

Hi

I have a filed which has the current chronological age for children in years, months and days. I have another field that determines reading age from a score in a standardised test (I have done this using a relational database ..... score of 20 for example means a reading age of 8 years, 10 months etc)

My question is ------> Is it possible to have a third field that shows the difference between the two other fields. So if a child has a chronological age of 8 years 10 months 3 days and a reading age of 6 years 2 months it would show -2 years 8 months (perhaps in red) or if they have a chronological age of 6 years 2 months 3 days and a reading age of 8 years 10 months it would show +2 years 8 months (perhaps in blue or whatever)

Many thanx in anticipation

Poida

NSW - Australia

[ESpringer]

It seems you ought to have in the first place not an age field, but a birthdate field (so you don't have to update all the time). Then you ought to be able to work with a calculated "ReadingAsIfBirthdate" value, either as a field (good for troubleshooting stage), or as something implicitly constructed within a calculation: subtracting the years (yrs*365) and months (mo*365/12) of the reading level from today. Then the BirthDate and the ReadingAsIfBirthdate values can be compared, no? I'm not sure how to get the difference to show up in a combination of years/months/days, though; would it be good enough to show it as, say, "2.5 years behind"?

[Poida]

Yes - I do have a birthdate field.............can you try to explain a bit more

(2.5yrs behind, ahead would be perfectly acceptable)

[ESpringer]

OK, so you've got a way to lookup the estimated reading level based on scores... can that reading level be put in terms of year values (not text of year plus month)? (I suppose a calculation could do it if there's a years field and a months field that could be divided by 12 and added to the years field)...

At any rate, you have an "ReadingAsIfAge" in years.

And you have BirthDate field, so...

Set up a calculation c_ReadingAsIfBorn = Today-(365.25*ReadingAsIfAge) {This gives "as if" birthdate}

Then another calculation c_Difference = (BirthDate - ReadingAsIfBorn)/365

The result would be the number of years' worth of reading difference: positive values are "ahead of schedule" and negative values are "behind"...

I'm new at the forum and self-taught, so I'm happy if others have a clearer way of explaining, or double-checking what's here...

[Poida]

Many thanx for your help ESpringer.

I am still a little confised though. Like you I am self taught and mostly do thjings by trial and error. Could you explain a litlle more the difference between having the year and months as text..

Thanx foir your patience

Poida

[ESpringer]

I had the impression that your main database was looking up or calculating the reading level virtual age based on a score, and that this matrix of scores and ages sits somewhere else in another file... so that if the student scored "20" you had a calculation which would return the value from the "ScoresToAges.fp5" (say) file, yielding something that looked like an age. But if those ages were really written out as in "six years two months" or even "6 yr 2 mo", FileMaker won't know how to treat that as anything but text without some dancing around.

I'd suggest data-entering that "AsIf" ages information (the info that the scores points to) in the form of number of months (74). Or of course you could have a calculation that work off of two fields (year and month) and calculates a value *either* in years with decimal *or* in months based on those two...

In order to do the calculations (all the work "under the hood"), everything's got to be in one numerical format rather than a combination of two different kinds of time units, but in your post it sounded like your starting info was written out "6 years 2 months" and that you want your eventual output to be written out "reading level 2 years 8 months behind actual age" (or whatever). In order to do that, your calculated numerical value (indicating the number of days "behind" or "ahead") would have to be converted back into a text string using a calculation...

Must run, sorry for shortness...

-ESpringer