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

1. Promoting Student Literacy with Lexiles Otis Fulton Senior Vice President MetaMetrics, Inc. ofulton@lexile.com Lexile.com

2. Topics • Lexile Development • Lexiles Today • Overview and Theory • Communicating With Parents • Summer Reading Lexile.com

3. Lexile Development Lexile.com

4. State of the Union - Yesterday • MetaMetrics 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. 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

6. Lexiles Today Lexile.com

7. State of the Union - Today • All major norm referenced tests are linked • Over 25-million students received a Lexile measure off a linked test in 2006-07 • Over 450 book publishers have titles with Lexile measures • Nearly 115,000 books to search at www.lexile.com • Over 100 million Lexiled articles through database services partners Lexile.com

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

9. State of the Union - Today • State Assessments • NCDPI North Carolina End-of-Grade Tests • TEA Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills • MDE Mississippi Curriculum Tests • WED Proficiency Assessments for Wyoming Students • ISBE Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) • MDESE Missouri Assessment Program (uses TerraNova) • NMPED New Mexico Standards Based Assessment • CDE California Standards Test • ODE Oregon Reading/Lit Knowledge and Skills Test • GDE Georgia Criterion Reference Competency Tests • SCDE Palmetto Achievement Challenge Tests • ADE Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) Lexile.com

10. Lexile State Adoptions Currently Using Lexiles and/or Quantiles Lexile.com

11. Lexile Overview and Theory Lexile.com

12. Three Key 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

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

14. 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 one billion words Lexile.com

15. Lexile Map -- Oregon Department of Education Lexile.com

16. John Grisham titles The Pelican Brief The Firm The Client The Testament A Time to Kill A Painted House The Partner The Street Lawyer The Brethren The Chamber The Rainmaker The Runaway Jury Lexile.com

17. Michael Crichton titles Rising Sun Disclosure Sphere Timeline Airframe A Case of Need The Lost World The Terminal Man Jurassic Park The Andromeda Strain Congo The Great Train Robbery Eaters of the Dead Lexile.com

18. Harry Potter Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 880 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 880 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 940 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 880 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 950 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 1030 Lexile.com

19. Lexiles and Newspapers • Reuters • NY Times • Washington Post • Wall Street Journal • Chicago Tribune • Associated Press • USA Today Lexile.com

20. Lexile Calculator Lexile.com

21. 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

22. Communicating with Parents Lexile.com

23. 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

24. 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

25. Summer Reading • Research on “Summer Slide” • Dr. James Kim, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine; Harvard University Lexile.com

26. Summer Reading • Research on “Summer Slide” • Dr. James Kim, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine; Harvard University • www.lexile.com/findabook Lexile.com

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32. Contact info -- Otis Fulton Senior Vice President, MetaMetrics, Inc. • ofulton@lexile.com • (804) 513-0326 Lexile.com