Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Lexile testing

Hi, all.

Last year, when my son was nine, he was given the Lexile test and his score was 1140. This year's teacher says the Lexile test is useless and doesn't go by it. If it's so useless then why does anyone use it? I can't find a consistent table for it; is it a good score?

Bump

Generally speaking, the Lexile measure has value in the context of multiple measures. Many schools use it as a screening, progress monitoring, and instructional grouping instrument, but I would not recommend its use for high-stakes decisions (certainly not in isolation).

This gives a rough idea of what Lexiles translate into:

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/guidedreading/leveling_chart.htm

as does this, which has two charts, one for the average student at each grade level (what typical kids can actually do), and one for instructional expectations (what we ask typical kids to do):

https://lexile.com/about-lexile/grade-equivalent/grade-equivalent-chart/

or this:

http://teacher.qa.scholastic.com/pr...s/SRC_GradeProf_Brochure_final_email.pdf

Notice that, on the last and most fine-grained of the three charts, your DC's Lexile places him in the middle of the proficient range for grade 12. Given that, there is a sense in which a new Lexile measure would not provide additional information of value, since he is already well above grade level. Although Lexiles can extend much higher than that (I've seen scores above 2000), he may have reached the technical limits of the measurement instrument being used by your school for his grade level.

I don't think it's useless, exactly, but I do notice that checking the Lexile of a book tells us nothing about the complexity or subtleties of its theme or its overall literary quality. If your child has a high Lexile (DS8 got about the same Lexile as your son this year--something in the low 1000s, anyway) I think it means that they have a very good vocabulary and can process complex sentences well. I'm not sure what it means about what they understand at a higher literary level. But I have not seen the tests they use.

The test was slightly useful for us in that it did cause me to realize that DS could probably read just about anything he felt like reading that would be of interest to him. I gave him Tolkien after I got the results, and it was a big success.

I don't pay much attention to the Lexile scores that DD12 receives along with her NWEA testing, since they said she could/should be reading Don Quixote (Lexile 1410) in 5th grade. While I often underestimate her, I don't think this was anywhere near correct.

Lexile scores are not useless, but they're not a total picture like posters above have mentioned. I find them to be accurate for academic nonfiction, like textbooks. But wherever there is meaning in what the words don't exactly say, Lexile isn't as relevant.

My son's Lexile is also in the 1300 range at 9 years old. I can hand him a college textbook to read (nice!), but he can't keep up in a college english class discussion - he can understand but not contribute.

Others have asked what can be done with a lexile score. They can be used for book selection.

Free online book selection databases include:
- Lexile Find-A-Book,
- Scholastic book wizard,
- Every Good Book (does not include Lexile Level... choose from broad reading level bands: Elementary, Middle School, Secondary/Adult).

Someone told me Lexile is a measure of readability. It applies to books, not students. Readability is assessed by a computer algorithm. It uses length of sentences and words. I know that the F&P letter system takes everything into account including themes, and assessments are done by trained teachers 1:1.

DD once took a Lexile test for a program and scored in the 10th grade range. But her performance measured over the year showed she was really reading and comprehending at the 7th grade level.

Yes, the Lexile website describes it here. There is both a reader measure (for students) and a text measure (for books).

As much as the Lexile measure has serious limitations, I do need to point out that F&P's reading assessment has an extremely limited research base, consisting solely of field testing using 498 children, even after all these years. (http://www.fountasandpinnell.com/shared/resources/FP_BAS_2ED_Research_Executive-Summary_v2012-08.pdf) There are no claims to nationally-representative normative information of any kind, and the assessment process itself is a bit subjective (the publisher likes to call this "qualitative"). Lexile, on the other hand, has a plenty deep data set, since Scholastic has licensed the SRI to thousands of schools. Comparing the two has an apple and orange quality to it.

I wouldn't put too much weight on either the Lexile measure of reading comprehension or the F&P measure of comprehension. They are each little snippets of data to be interpreted as parts of the big picture.