From Otis Fulton Senior Vice President MetaMetrics , Inc. ofulton@lexile

1. From Otis Fulton Senior Vice President MetaMetrics, Inc. ofulton@lexile.com

2. An educational tool that links text and readers under a common metric-- Lexiles • Characterizes reader with a measure and text with a measure • Allows educators to forecast the level of comprehension a reader is expected to experience with a particular text The Lexile Framework™ for Reading Lexile.com

3. Founded in 1984 • R&D firm focused on integrating assessment and instruction • Research funded by five grants from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development • Commercialized The Lexile Framework for Reading in 1997 State of the Union - Yesterday Lexile.com

4. All major norm reference tests are linked • Over 19-million students will get a Lexile measure from a linked test in 2004-05 • Over 450 book publishers have titles with Lexile measures • Nearly 50,000* books to search at www.lexile.com • Over 70 million Lexiled articles through database-services partners Info about… Lexile.com

5. Test Publishers • NWEA: MAPS, Achievement Level Tests • Harcourt: SAT-10, SAT-9, MAT-8, SDRT-4, Aprenda • Riverside: The Iowa Tests (ITBS, ITED), GMRT-4 • CTB/McGraw-Hill: TerraNova Assessment Series • Scholastic: SRI, SRI-Interactive, Reading Counts!, Read180, iRead More… Lexile.com

6. 3 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studies "Lexiles provide a more accurate measure of grade appropriateness" (Binkley, 13) • "Assessing the Lexile Framework: Results of a Panel Meeting," White, S. April 2001, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/200108.pdf • "A Content Comparison of the NAEP and PIRLS Fourth-Grade Reading Assessments," Binkley, M. April 2003, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/200310.pdf • “International Comparisons in Fourth-Grade Reading Literacy: Findings from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) of 2001,” Ogle L. April 2003, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003073.pdf State of the Union - Today Lexile.com

7. State Adoptions • California (6.1M students, STAR) • Texas (4.1M students, TAKS) • North Carolina (1.3M students, NCEOG) • Utah (500K students, UCA) • Idaho (246K students, ISAT) • Hawaii (185K students, SAT-9, SAT-10) • Wyoming (90K students, WyCAS) • Oregon (250 K via Reading First grant) • Florida: 90% of districts, including Duval, Broward, Miami-Dade and Pinellas • Other states get optional Lexile reports State of the Union - Today Lexile.com

8. Database Services • Follett Library Services: Library MARC records can be updated with Lexile measures, info at www.fsc.follett.com CCS: One aspect of text complexity More Lexile.com

9. Addison-Wesley Britannica Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Crabtree Globe-Fearon Dominee Hampton-Brown DK Publishing Harcourt School Publishers Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Holt Rinehart & Winston Globe-Fearon Houghton Mifflin Hampton Brown Prentice Hall Harcourt SRA/McGraw-Hill Holt Scott Foresman Leapfrog Lee & Low Bigchalk/ProQuest EBSCO NoveList The Booksource Bound-to-Stay Bound DEMCO Econoclad Permabound Follett Library Services Follett Software Company Baker & Taylor Mackin Library Media The Book Source Follett Library Services Follett Software Co. Ingram RRBowker Sundance Textbook Publishers Trade Book Publishers Test Publishers CTB/McGraw-Hill Modern Curriculum Pearson Educational Testing Services (ETS) Scholastic Harcourt Educational Measurement Rand McNally Rigby North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Rosen Northwest Evaluation Association SRA/McGraw-Hill Riverside Publishing Scott Foresman Texas Education Agency Steck-Vaughn Utah State Office of Education The Wright Group Prebinders Periodical Databases Book Distributors & Databases The Unification of Reading School/Public Libraries Reading Motivation EBSCO Online Reader Hooked on Phonics HOSTS Scholastic Read180 Lexile.com Scholastic Reading Counts! Success for All

10. Reading Ability • The cognitive set students use to construct meaning from text, as measured on tests • Readability • The difficulty of reading materials, based on dimensions or characteristics of the text • Reading Comprehension • The construction of meaning, from local text Three Important Concepts Lexile.com

11. Test of Reading Development The Lexile Analyzer The Lexile Map Linking Technology Lexile Framework Components Lexile.com

12. Syntactic Complexity • the number of words per sentence • longer sentences are more complex and require more short-term memory to process • Semantic Difficulty • the frequency of the words in a corpus of written text • corpus has over 650-million words Determining text difficulty Lexile.com

13. Lexile.com

14. The Pelican Brief 660The Firm 680The Client 730The Testament 770A Time to Kill 770A Painted House 780The Partner 790The Street Lawyer 790The Brethren 810The Chamber 810The Rainmaker 830The Runaway Jury 930 John Grisham titles Lexile.com

15. Rising Sun 540Disclosure 590Sphere 610Timeline 620Airframe 640A Case of Need 650The Lost World 670The Terminal Man 690Jurassic Park 710The Andromeda Strain 840Congo 940The Great Train Robbery 1060Eaters of the Dead 1090 Michael Crichton titles Lexile.com

16. Reuters (1440L) • NY Times (1380L) • Washington Post (1350L) • Wall Street Journal (1320L) • Chicago Tribune (1310L) • Associated Press (1310L) • USA Today (1200L) Lexiles and Newspapers Lexile.com

17. Emphasize that the Lexile Framework does not address: • interest, • age appropriateness, • text support, or • text quality. It looks only at text difficulty – books should always be previewed. Lexile.com