Mistacres Blog

Mistacres School provides indivualized programs to their students . They do this by using the Lexile.The Lexile Framework for Reading is a standard measurement which allows us to match the reader to the text. It was developed by an organization called MetaMetrics. They recognized that grade and age was not the way to determine a child’s ability to understand text. They compare it to going into a store to buy shoes. The child walks in and the sales clerk asks him his age. He states he is 12. The sales clerk goes in and brings out a rack of shoes labelled “12 year olds”. The boy looks at the shoes and at his feet – that they don’t match.

http://www.youtube.com/metametrics

We don’t buy things by our age – we buy by who we are, what we need, what fits us. Then why to we teach that way. A child who is 12,  in 6^th grade is determined to be at a certain level. That child is given textbooks and materials for that grade level. And who determines the content of the material? Textbook publishers that haven’t a clue how to differentiate material.

Many years ago I taught a reading class at a local college. At that time I also worked in a public school with learning disabled students. I took into the class a dilemma. A 7^th grade science teacher came in frusrated and threw down her science text. “I don’t know what to do with your students. Even when I get a textbook written especially for slow learners they still don’t get it. They’re just to stupid to understand and you need to fix it.”

Back in those days, teachers used various methods based on a formula of number of sentences, length of the sentences, words and characters in the sentence, etc. It meant graphing out the text of a number of samples in the book to come up with a grade level for the text. I copied various pages from te book and distributed them to the students. There task, to determine the grade level of this book labeled, “Adapted for the Handicapped Student”. What they found shocked them. This “adapted” text was written on a level that ranged from 11^th grade to 1^st year college. And the students were “just to dumb to get it”?

But those days SHOULD be over. The Lexile has allowed us to put children on a universal scale. When we drive from state to state, we know what 35 mph means. Just because we change states doesn’t mean that the measurement changes. However, when a child moves from school to school, much less state to state, the way their reading skills are measured differ. Their Lexile score is the same regardless of where they go to school and it is immediately usable. It is this measurement that allows us to ensure a “good fit” . It helps us select reading material that meets and challenges each student’s ability. More important, it is a powerful tool for matching instruction in content areas to the reader which leads to individual achievement and SUCCESS. Using Lexiles, teachers can connect students with instructional resources that match their reading abilities. And it isn’t just fiction and nonfiction books that are Lexiled. The list of textbooks, periodicals and Web sites with Lexile measures grows every day.