One of the challenges of my TIP is to accurately attain the reading levels of my students; this can be devilishly hard. One problem is that reading inventories by their nature push kids to failure. It requires them to read progressively harder passages until they can no longer understand them. Because a particular context or lexis set might stump them, the students have to actually be exposed to multiple passages that are too hard. The end result is that the process is tedious. Therefore some kids simply stop trying leading to false scores that don’t represent their actual ability.
Another factor affecting motivation is that the kids are very wary of scoring high on their reading inventories for fear that this will encourage the teacher to force them to read ‘harder’ books. Almost without exception, kids prefer to read multiple easy books rather than longer, harder books. Finally, it would be much too unfair to grade students on their lexile growth because it is affected by factors beyond the students’ control. The end result being you can’t tell kids their lexile scores will influence their marks.
This situation creates an environment where the reading level scores hinge heavily on the teacher being able to persuade the students to do their best on the particular day on which the reading inventory is given.
2 comments:
Hi Matt,
The things you've considered here are interesting to me. I never considered that kids would just stop trying because the passages got harder, but of course that makes sense.
At your school, do the teachers hold the students to reading at their lexile? As we didn't have our whole middle school using Reading Counts, rather AR, we only used their lexiles for informational purposes. And, I know this sounds backwards... we didn't have the Star Reader test, so we really didn't hold our kids accountable for their AR levels either.
However, my kids really did like to do their best, and if their scores went down ( as they can easily do on the SRI) they begged to take them again. ( I let them.. much to the horror of others. :) )
Hi Amy,
We have backed away from forcing the kids to read at their tested level; our ESL students can easily get in over the heads with a foreign context.
At first the kids in the program, like yours, want to score high but later they become paranoid about being forced to read books that are too difficult for them.
Matt
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