Jun
2016
quantile measurements in education
Quantile Measures for Math Added to Kansas Student Assessments
By Dian Schaffhauser 05/27/16
There are two types of Lexile measures: a person’s reading ability and the text’s difficulty. Students who are tested against state standards receive a Lexile reader measure from the Kansas Reading Assessment. Books and other texts receive a Lexile text measure from a MetaMetrics software tool called the Lexile Analyzer, which describes the book’s reading demand or complexity. When used together, the two measures are intended to help match a reader with reading material that is at an appropriate difficulty or will at least help give an idea of how well a reader should comprehend text. The reader should encounter some level of difficulty with the text, but not enough to get frustrated. The Lexile reader measure is used to monitor reader progress.
My note: is this another way / attempt to replace humans as educators? Or it is a supplemental approach to improve students’ reading abilities.
Keith Ewing
June 2, 2016 at 11:10 pm (8 years ago)My reading of this news release is that it is not an attempt to replace humans as educators. It’s really a long overdue approach to a more granular understanding of an individual’s reading and comprehension abilities. We generally make too many assumptions about a person’s reading and comprehension abilities. Is a person who graduated from high school, for instance, read to read Kant or Huserl? For a limited few, perhaps, but for most no. Too many high school textbooks are written to an “8th grade reading level”–but that’s really just an average of everyone in 8th grade, not even the mean. For some, such a textbook would be difficult, beyond their abilities; for others, it would be simple and boring. Students at both ends are potentially at risk. It appears that Kansas is making an effort to address a better understanding of the issues related to this. But there is some risk that it could lead to pressure on teachers to address the varieties of abilities in a classroom or to tracking.