She also took a straight SRI Lexile test in 2nd grade (the same test she took this year) and the district gave us a print out with a national norm of 99th percentile, so I assumed that the SRI lexile test, in and of itself, had normative data not just the tests with which it is correlated.
You are right.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/sri/overview/faq.htm#13What do the normative data reported by SRI indicate?
Norms are derived from the administration of a given assessment, in this case SRI, to a large and representative sample of students across several grades. Students are selected to represent as closely as possible the relevant characteristics of the national population of students. The results of this large, grade-by-grade administration (or the accumulation of data that produces a sample large enough to be representative) create grade-specific, rank-ordered distributions of performance. In other words, for each grade, scores are arranged from lowest to highest to determine the percentage of students at each score. The percentile rank associated with each score represents that score�s position in the ranking.
Because the sample from which the percentile ranks are derived is large and nationally representative, it can be used to determine how your students compare nationally to students in the same grade. For example, when a student earns a Lexile score at the 35th percentile on SRI, he or she is doing as well as or better than 35% of students nationally in the same grade. A student who scores at the 50th percentile is doing as well as or better than 50% of students nationally in the same grade. Percentile ranks do not tell you in an absolute terms how well your students are doing, only how well they are doing compared to other students at their grade level. In other words, normative information tells you nothing about students� mastery of the knowledge, skills, or abilities being measured, only about the relative standing of students compared to one another.
