Education is a Process, Not a Destination

Dec. 14, 2007

Yes, I am a geek.

The best-fit curve was added by hand but is rather off because he continues reading books below his actual reading level. I arbitrarily assigned BR/beginning readers a value of 20. The one book up in the 1000s is really a fluke--I don't think it was nearly that hard.  However, he's definitely read some solidly fifth-grade level texts now.

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Dec. 29, 2007 - Lexile levels

Posted by Kai

Lexile levels can be thrown off quite a bit just by sentence length, I've found. For example, the Henry and Mudge books are very easy to read but have extremely long sentences, which makes their Lexile levels generally around 400. Magic Tree House books are usually in the 200s but they are much harder to read, and I'm quite sure this is because of their famous sentence fragments. Your post actually prompted me to try an experiment that I've been wanting to do for years now. I typed up a (very small) portion of a Magic Tree House book using the existing punctuation and used the Lexile Analyzer on it. Then I altered to punctuation to make longer, but totally logical sentences. For the passage I tried, the Lexile level of the original piece was 390 and my altered piece was 590. The words were no different. The passage I picked wasn't even one with a huge number of sentence fragments. Anyway, I'm glad you're posting here again. And I must be a geek too, because I made a very similar graph when my son was learning to read.

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Dec. 29, 2007 - From Rey...

Posted by Anonymous

Magic Tree House were quite a bit easier for my DS to read than Henry and Mudge. There was SO much word repetition and the paragraphs were SO short. I dislike them, though, so he can read them, but only independently--not with me! I've found, overall, that Lexile is more reliable than Accelerated Reader. (I have a similar Accelerated Reader graph.) Some of the books that he's read, like the Jean Fritz history, are definitely 5th grade. Others are either harder or easier than they officially score. I think that, on the average, the scores end up being pretty accurate, but they are quite bad at distinguishing between, say, Little Bear and Frog and Toad. The longer and more advanced the work, the closer they tend to be to accurate. The Bear's going to continue to have books in the very easy ranges as he gets better, which will depress a best-fit curve, because I do NOT believe in giving kids books only at levels that "challenge" them. That's a good way to get them to believe that reading is frustrating or at least boring. I do believe that kids should follow a natural pattern, which includes books much easier and quite a bit harder than their "level." This flies in the face of AR, but it matches with studies of what excellent readers actually DO. I give him a lot of new books. If something sticks, then we look for more by that author. If it doesn't then we move on. If he picks out a book himself, then we give that a whirl, too, though he mostly relies on me to find new authors because I have a better hit rate than he does for finding things that he likes. So he reads a variety of things, some self-selected and some picked by me.

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