I do with Quantile measures what I do with Lexile measures; ignore them. Quantile measures were developed by the same company as Lexiles. Like Lexiles, they are at best useless and at worst dangerous.
Good writing is precise and concise. To get a high Lexile, a book needs long sentences with long words, so a poorly written book with wordy sentences and overblow vocabulary will get a high Lexile rating. Lexile doesn’t take into account subject matter, theme, use of figurative language, or artistry. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (730L) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (850L) are in the 4-5 grade band. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (920L), which includes two graphic rape scenes, and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (930L) fall into the grade 6-8 band but fall into the grade 4-5 stretch Lexile band many schools are using under Common Core. Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (970L) has a higher Lexile rating than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (890L), yet Carroll’s book is far more complex as a literary work.
I don’t know much about Quantile ratings and how they are determined. However, from what I've seen, their Quantile ratings for math texts are as faulty as Lexiles. My DD’s algebra textbook is badly written and contains asinine problems. For example:
“Suppose you have a job in an ice cream shop that pays $6 per hour. You also have a babysitting job that pays $4 per hour. You want to earn at least $60 per week but would like to work no more than 12 hours per week.
a. Graph and write a system of inequalities that describes this situation.
b. Give three possible solutions to the system.”
Quite frankly, if you don’t know immediately that working 10 hours in the ice cream shop earns your minimum income of $60 without exceeding the maximum number of hours you want to work, I don’t want you working in my ice cream shop let alone babysitting my kid. This kind of real world application of math drives me insane. This chapter of the book has a Quantile rating of 1150L which puts it in the Algebra II range. This problem w^2 – 8w = 0 is from chapter 10 which is rated 1200Q, also Algebra II.
The problem with these measures is that an algorithm simply can’t measure the complexity of texts in any usable way. The quality and complexity of a book can only be determined having people actually read the book. An intelligent human being (parent, teacher, tutor) who knows a child well is the best judge of what books (mathematical or literary) are best suited to engage and challenge that particular child.
Last edited by Julie; 06/04/15 10:50 AM.
