Otis Fulton Senior Vice President MetaMetrics, Inc. ofulton@lexile

1. Otis Fulton Senior Vice President MetaMetrics, Inc. ofulton@lexile.com

2. Topics • Lexile Development • Lexiles Today • Lexile Overview and Theory • Communicating with Parents • Matching Readers and Text • www.lexile.com • searching for titles • analyzing text Lexile.com

3. Lexile Development

4. State of the Union - Yesterday • Founded in 1984 • R&D firm focused on integrating assessment and instruction • Research funded by five grants from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development • Commercialized The Lexile Framework for Reading in 1997 Lexile.com

5. MetaMetrics SBIR Grants Awarding Agency: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Lexile.com

6. The Lexile Framework™ for Reading • An educational tool that links text and readers under a common metric-- Lexiles • Characterizes reader with a measure and text with a measure • Allows educators to forecast the level of comprehension a reader is expected to experience with a particular text Lexile.com

7. Lexiles Today

8. State of the Union - Today • All major norm reference tests are linked • Over 19-million students will get a Lexile measure from a linked test in 2004-05 • Over 450 book publishers have titles with Lexile measures • Nearly 50,000* books to search at www.lexile.com • Over 70 million Lexiled articles through database-services partners Lexile.com

9. State of the Union - Today • Test Publishers • NWEA: MAPS, Achievement Level Tests • Harcourt: SAT-10, SAT-9, MAT-8, SDRT-4, Aprenda • Riverside: The Iowa Tests (ITBS, ITED), GMRT-4 • CTB/McGraw-Hill: TerraNova Assessment Series • Scholastic: SRI, SRI-Interactive, Reading Counts!, Read180, iRead Lexile.com

10. State of the Union - Today • 3 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studies "Lexiles provide a more accurate measure of grade appropriateness" (Binkley, 13) • "Assessing the Lexile Framework: Results of a Panel Meeting," White, S. April 2001, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/200108.pdf • "A Content Comparison of the NAEP and PIRLS Fourth-Grade Reading Assessments," Binkley, M. April 2003, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/200310.pdf • “International Comparisons in Fourth-Grade Reading Literacy: Findings from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) of 2001,” Ogle L. April 2003, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003073.pdf Lexile.com

11. State of the Union - Today • State Adoptions • California (6.1M students, STAR) • Texas (4.1M students, TAKS) • North Carolina (1.3M students, NCEOG) • Utah (500K students, UCA) • Idaho (246K students, ISAT) • Hawaii (185K students, SAT-9, SAT-10) • Wyoming (90K students, WyCAS) • Oregon (250 K via Reading First grant) • Florida: 90% of districts, including Duval, Broward, Miami-Dade and Pinellas • Other states get optional Lexile reports Lexile.com

12. State of the Union - Today • Database Services • Allow educators to supplement textbook instruction and reading with periodicals, newspapers, reference books & transcripts • EBSCO: 8M Lexiled at www.ebsco.com • Bigchalk: 60M Lexiled at www.bigchalk.com • Follett Library Services: Library MARC records can be updated with Lexile measures, info at www.fsc.follett.com Lexile.com

13. A non-proprietary standard • Many ways (linking technologies) to place a student on the scale • Many publishers have adopted the standard • “Connects the year-to-year with the day-to-day.” Lexile.com

14. Addison-Wesley Britannica Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Crabtree Globe-Fearon Dominee Hampton-Brown DK Publishing Harcourt School Publishers Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Holt Rinehart & Winston Globe-Fearon Houghton Mifflin Hampton Brown Prentice Hall Harcourt SRA/McGraw-Hill Holt Scott Foresman Leapfrog Lee & Low Bigchalk/ProQuest EBSCO NoveList The Booksource Bound-to-Stay Bound DEMCO Econoclad Permabound Follett Library Services Follett Software Company Baker & Taylor Mackin Library Media The Book Source Follett Library Services Follett Software Co. Ingram RRBowker Sundance The Unification of Reading Textbook Publishers Trade Book Publishers Test Publishers CTB/McGraw-Hill Modern Curriculum Pearson Educational Testing Services (ETS) Scholastic Harcourt Educational Measurement Rand McNally Rigby North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Rosen Northwest Evaluation Association SRA/McGraw-Hill Riverside Publishing Scott Foresman Texas Education Agency Steck-Vaughn Utah State Office of Education The Wright Group Prebinders Periodical Databases Book Distributors & Databases School/Public Libraries Reading Motivation EBSCO Online Reader Hooked on Phonics HOSTS Scholastic Read180 Scholastic Reading Counts! Lexile.com Success for All

15. Lexile Overview and Theory

16. Three Important Concepts • Reading Ability • The cognitive set students use to construct meaning from text, as measured on tests • Readability • The difficulty of reading materials, based on dimensions or characteristics of the text • Reading Comprehension • The construction of meaning, from local text Lexile.com

17. Test of Reading Development Lexile Framework Components The Lexile Analyzer The Lexile Map Linking Technology Lexile.com

18. Determining text difficulty • Syntactic Complexity • the number of words per sentence • longer sentences are more complex and require more short-term memory to process • Semantic Difficulty • the frequency of the words in a corpus of written text • corpus has over 650-million words Lexile.com

19. Placing texts on the map Lexile.com

20. Lexile.com

21. John Grisham titles The Pelican Brief 660The Firm 680The Client 730The Testament 770A Time to Kill 770A Painted House 780The Partner 790The Street Lawyer 790The Brethren 810The Chamber 810The Rainmaker 830The Runaway Jury 930 Lexile.com

22. Michael Crichton titles Rising Sun 540Disclosure 590Sphere 610Timeline 620Airframe 640A Case of Need 650The Lost World 670The Terminal Man 690Jurassic Park 710The Andromeda Strain 840Congo 940The Great Train Robbery 1060Eaters of the Dead 1090 Lexile.com

23. Lexiles and Newspapers • Reuters (1440L) • NY Times (1380L) • Washington Post (1350L) • Wall Street Journal (1320L) • Chicago Tribune (1310L) • Associated Press (1310L) • USA Today (1200L) Lexile.com

24. Lexile Calculator • Forecasted Comprehension • The relationship between a reader and a text. • How well the reader will comprehend the material in the text. • Can perform the following calculations: • The rate at which a student is expected to comprehend of the text. • The reading ability a reader is expected to need in order to comprehend the text at a specific level. Lexile.com

25. Lexile Calculator Lexile.com

26. Lexile Calculator • Forecasted comprehension rates: • Reader measure – text calibration = O Lexiles, 75% comprehension • Reader measure – text calibration = --250 Lexiles, 50% comprehension • Reader measure – text calibration = +250 Lexiles, 90% comprehension Lexile.com

27. Lexile Calculator • Can help you better deliver instruction by knowing in advance which students: • are likely to need extra help with a lesson • will understand the material on their own Lexile.com

28. Placing readers on the map Harcourt EducationalSAT-9 and SAT-8 [SAT-10, 2004] MeasurementSDRTMAT-8 CTB/McGraw-HillTerraNova Assessment Series Riverside Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test Iowa Tests of Basic Skills [Fall, 2003] ScholasticSRI and SRI-Interactive, iRead NWEA Achievement Level Tests (ALT) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) North CarolinaNorth Carolina End-of-Grade Test Oregon State Assessment of Reading/Literature UtahCore Assessment Series, Basic Skills Test TexasTexas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) Wyoming [under development] Lexile.com

29. Communicating with Parents

30. Communicating with Parents • Don’t get too focused on numbers – ranges are important. • Give examples of books and other text materials. • Talk about where the student is now, but also where they are going! Lexile.com

31. Communicating with Parents • Emphasize that the Lexile Framework does not address: • interest, • age appropriateness, • text support, or • text quality. It looks only at text difficulty – books should always be previewed. Lexile.com

32. Matching Readers and Text www.lexile.com