Lexiles and Other Things That Freak Us Out

originally posted January 31, 2013, on My Big Campus

I like Lexiles. I really do. They have been helpful in the past by guiding me how to match students with text. After all, that's what they are intended to be used for. But lately I've been getting quite a few calls from principals and lead teachers, particularly from our elementary ranks where Lexiles are a new thing. The calls essentially center around the same concern: "Our evaluations are now linked to Lexiles, and I don't know what to do with them to help our kids get better with them!"

I really empathize with my colleagues; suddenly, here is one more "high-stakes" ingredient to add to the broth, and this one seems very foreign from what they know well. I am hopeful that this post will help to bring down the anxiety level around this topic. Please jump in below in the comments to ask more questions if you need to. You are not alone in feeling anxious about Lexiles.

 Lexile.com and Metametricsinc.com give a lot of great information about Lexiles. In short, a text receives a static Lexile number based on its sentence length and word frequency; for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird has a Lexile of 870L. A student receives a Lexile number or range each time he or she takes a Lexile-based assessment (like the SRI or MAP), and this Lexile gets larger as the student develops as a reader. Lexiles are used primarily to match students with text; a student who has a Lexile range of 800-950L should be able to read To Kill a Mockingbird without much trouble. However, the Lexile is only one measure of several that we need to consider when matching students with text. My own dear third grader has the aforementioned Lexile range according to her latest MAP assessment, but because of the mature themes and type of background knowledge required for reading To Kill a Mockingbird, she won't be reading that great novel anytime soon!

The bottom line is that Lexiles are valuable measures that have a clear purpose, which is not related to choosing instructional methodologies that will increase reading ability. Lexiles do not tell us anything about a students' reading strengths or weaknesses. They do not tell us where to start tackling a struggling reader's challenges through instruction. In our elementary schools, we have several other data points that do tell us these essential things, and if we want to see Lexiles go up, we need to be paying more attention to these other points and doing an even better job responding to them.

1. Let's do what we've been doing even better! F&P benchmark assessments and the accompanying Continuum are exceptionally valuable tools in getting to know our students' reading strengths and deficits (in accuracy, fluency, types of miscues, and comprehension skills) and in responding instructionally. When the F&P benchmark is administered by a trained teacher with fidelity, she learns invaluable information that she can turn around and use the Continuum to address.

2. Don't toss aside the MAP altogether! Look closely at the MAP disaggregated reading information and the associated Descartes. Use the MAP data to confirm or refute your F&P data; look closely at how the Descartes and Continuum profiles parallel each other or offer additional information and use the two together to make informed, targeted instructional decisions. I particularly like looking at individual Student Progress Reports to see a student's percentile ranking and how the student performed overall (Low, Average, High) in each of the sub-strands.

If I as a teacher use the F&P benchmark assessment data, the Continuum, the disaggregated Reading MAP data, the Descartes, and other classroom formative measures to respond quickly and appropriately to my students' reading deficits, we will see my students' Lexiles grow. When I use Lexiles to begin text matching, knowledge of my students' interests, integrated content instruction/disciplinary literacy, integrated technology resources, and solid writing instruction, we will also see my students' Lexiles grow. Additionally, we will see their MSA scores improve and, most importantly, we will see their confidence in themselves as readers and writers grow tremendously.