Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Matching age appropriate content with lexile score

I'm with the others-- it's ridiculous, and even a cursory examination of the lexile scoring of any series of well-known works shows this in a hurry.

I refused to submit my DD to "lexile" assessments after the thing stupidly proposed that my then 6yo DD should be reading...


Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Madame Bovary... etc.

(laughably, to be sure)

Yeah. I don't think so.

She reads what she likes, and she has since she learned. The last I tracked her reading was when she was about seven, but she was regularly reading 500-1500 pages a month-- all of it above grade level. She doesn't seem to have any trouble now that she's taking AP Literature as a 13yo, by the way (unlike some of her conventionally-aged but still bright classmates, I might add).

I like the technique of asking the teacher "what should I do with this information? I need help with this."

That's exactly what I did, too-- and the teacher laughed WITH ME over just how stupid this kind of thing is when applied to HG+ children who are avid readers.

I agree with what others are saying -- at some point reading has to stop being about learning to be a better reader, and be just about . . . reading. Reading is a tool. For learning stuff. Once someone is reading at a college level, improving their reading level should just not be part of the agenda at all.

Also, a teacher who thinks going from 250 to 248 is a statistically significant drop doesn't know what she's talking about.

My dd was in about that Lexile range at the same age. A search for "humor" in that range in the online list produced a single scholarly treatise on humor, one that looked incredibly boring. So we've just not bothered with dwelling on her Lexile range. She is now 13yo and still reads a huge amount, most of it "below her Lexile level," but she enjoys it all immensely.

We had the same problem with our daughter. I actually pleaded for her to read lower lexile works. I figured she could then read whatever she needed to read or liked to read. She was reading so many years above her grade level (at least five years). She was done with reading comprehension at that point.

I had to get special permission to have her read what others were reading - mainly for social reasons.

DD9's Lexile in 2nd grade was higher than in 4th grade. Go figure. It's a rough guide at best.

What we do is let her have access to anything she wants to read. Her teacher did this as well in 3rd grade. Instead of her reading stuff at her Lexile level, it usually ends up being grade-level stuff like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and the "Goddess Girl" series. She is not voracious in that she is very particular about what she reads, especially if it contains content that upsets her.

Then we have her try bigger books that are in the upper end of her range. This is hit or miss but in the past few months, thanks to public domain books on her Kindle, she has read and enjoyed unabridged versions of:

Little Women
Little Men
The Secret Garden
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Treasure Island

I am also encouraging her to use the Kindle's built-in dictionary function whenever she hits a word she doesn't know, but this is proving a challenge to get her to do it consistently.

ITA! Honestly, it surprises me that lexiles would still be used as a tool for selecting books in 7th grade for *any* student (unless they were in a remedial reading program) - but I'm also coming from a background where reading levels weren't really used at all once my kids learned to read, with one exception (my youngest dd is in a different school than my older two, more traditional, and they use AR to select *part* of the books they read independently). My ds was reading and understanding college-level science etc texts bin early elementary. We too had a really tough time choosing fiction books for a short while (and I do wish I'd thought it through enough to realize there would be a chapter on reproduction organs before buying him the college-level anatomy book when he was 7... )... but what we did was just let him choose what he wanted to read - and he didn't choose fiction until around 4th grade when other kids started reading things like Warriors etc - and we let him read the same things other kids his age were reading and he loved them. I don't think it stymied his development of reading skills at all - he could already read very well! What it did do was help him see that reading could be for FUN and enjoyment... and I think that's something that you really have to balance with trying to find appropriately leveled books. I think most of us adults who love to read simply for the sake of reading don't think twice before picking up a book that is technically below the level we're capable of reading - so why should our kids not be able to?

Anyway, fwiw, my ds reads so fast that he runs out of books to read quickly... so I have spent time digging around for fiction books for him to read. He's in 7th grade, and what I've been doing this year is picking books from the AP Lit lists, as well as other interesting books I see listed on Hoagies etc. If it's a book I haven't read, I take a quick look through reviews online to see if it's something I think he'd enjoy or doesn't contain themes I'd rather he not be exposed to yet. He's really enjoyed the classics on these lists - but to be honest, I have no idea what the lexile level is on anything he's reading.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Oh, one more thing. I'm an academic, I read academic writing all the time. And I sometimes encounter writing so complex that it pushes my comprehension abilities. You know what we call that in the biz? BAD WRITING. And I bet it would have a lexile score through the roof.

That's the problem with using lexile scores beyond the early levels -- it turns difficult-to-comprehend writing into a virtue for its own sake. It's a perversion of the whole purpose of skillful written communication.

Meg: You. Are. Awesome.

Yes. Yes! YES!

And yes again!

I scored college level reading comp sometime in the primary grades. It would have been a joke to try to get me to read actual adult literature then. Just good books, classics, silly stuff, amazing themes, etc were what I enjoyed and learned from. I read a LOT but realistic contemporary fiction was always lowest on my list, until actual college. A good reader should have exposure and then read for pleasure. It really will take care of itself.