Are my students on track for College and Career Readiness?

College and Career Readiness

Are my students on track for College and Career readiness?

Developed in conjunction with MetaMetrics®

Technical Paper

Technical Paper “On-track” for College and Career Readiness

IntroductionAbout Achieve3000, Inc. – Achieve3000 is the leader in online differentiated literacy instruction, serving over two million students worldwide. For nearly 15 years, the company has been reach-ing students at their individual reading levels to deliver significant learning gains, with many making double to triple the expected gains in a single school year. Based on decades of scientific research, Achieve3000’s solutions – Smarty Ants® (for grades PreK-1), KidBiz3000® (for grades 2-5), TeenBiz3000® (for grades 6-8), Empower3000™ (for grades 9-12), Spark3000® (for adult learn-ers), and eScience3000® (for grades 6-8) – sup-port core curriculum, Response to Intervention, English language learner, and special education instructional models as well as 21st-century

education initiatives. From learning how to read to workforce readiness, Achieve3000 empowers all learners to develop the college and career literacy skills needed for academic, profes-sional, and personal success. Learn more about Achieve3000 at www.achieve3000.com.

This paper presents the technical and pedagogi-cal foundations behind Achieve3000’s College and Career readiness reports. These tools are designed to support the Common Core State Standards initiative and help educators in all states monitor the progress of all students to ensure that they will be ready for postsecondary endeavors.


Rising to New Standards 1

Text Complexity 2

Stretch Ranges 3

“On Track” for College and Career Readiness using LevelSet Results 6

References 8

Are my students on track for Collegeand Career readiness?

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“On-track” for College and Career Readiness

Results from the Achieve3000 web-based literacy solutions (LevelSet and the differ-entiated instructional activities) are calculated using the Lexile® scale, a scientifically based scale of reading ability. The Lexile scale provides accurate feedback, helping measure progress and forecast student development. Achieve3000 has developed a college- and career-readiness report (“Are my students on track for College and Career readiness?”). This report is designed to describe students’ readiness for college and career based on their current Lexile reading level. The report can also be used to identify which students are most in need of support and to plan aggressive interven-tion where it is most needed.

■ Rising to New StandardsAlthough states have developed their own individual curriculum standards for years, recently there has been an unprecedented focus on developing common curriculum standards for use throughout the United States of America. Guided and supported by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Associa-tion (NGA), departments of education in the states, the United States territories and the District of Columbia have collaborated to identify common standards in English/language arts, mathematics and other content areas. Educators, researchers and edu-cational policy makers were involved extensively in the effort to identify, catalog, review, and adopt standards that would lead to students being “college and career ready” by the end of high school. The Common Core State Standards are the culmination of this work. They were released in June 2010 by the CCSSO and the NGA Center for Best Practices. Forty-six states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the standards. The standards may be viewed at www.corestandards.org.

The CCSS Initiative has established a clear set of K-12 standards that is designed to enable all students to graduate from high school “college and career ready.” From this perspective the CCSS advocate a particular stance with regard to reading, and states that have not adopted CCSS have likewise implemented new standards for literacy de-signed to prepare students for the challenges of higher education and the increasingly competitive global workforce.

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a founda-tion of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can gain this foundation only when the curricu-lum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success. (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 10)

Forty-six states, the District of

Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands

have adopted the standards.

The standards may be viewed at www.corestandards.org

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■ Text ComplexityThe Standards for English Language Arts focus on the importance of text complexity. As stated in Standard 10, students must be able to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading, NGA Center and CCSSO, 2010a, p.10).

The Common Core State Standards recommends a three-part model for evaluating the complexity of a text. It describes text complexity as “the inherent difficulty of reading and comprehending a text combined with consideration of reader and task variables…a three-part assessment of text [complexity] that pairs qualitative and quantitative measures with reader-task considerations” (NGA Center and CCSSO, 2010a, p. 43). In simpler terms, text complexity is a transaction between text, reader and task. Consistent with the Common Core definition of text complexity as the transaction between reader, text, and task, the underlying mathematical equation used to generate a Lexile mea-sure (a quantitative measure of text complexity) is based on the relationship between an examinee’s actual reading comprehension level (for a given task) and the features of a specific text. In short, the Lexile measure directly reflects the Common Core definition of a quantitative measure of text complexity.

The quantitative aspect of defining text complexity consists of a stair-step progression of increasingly difficult text by grade levels (see Table 1) (Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, Appendix A, NGA Center and CCSSO, 2010b, p. 8). MetaMet-rics® research on the typical reading demands of college and careers contributed to the Common Core State Standards as a whole and, more specifically, to the Lexile®-based grade bands.

Table 1 – Text Complexity Grade Bands and Associated Lexile Ranges

Text Complexity Grade Bands Lexile Ranges Aligned to College and Career Readiness Expectations

K–1 N/A

2–3 420L–820L

4–5 740L–1010L

6–8 925L–1185L

9–10 1050L–1335L

11–CCR 1185L–1385L

In a study comparing various measures of text complexity (Nelson, Perfetti, Liben, & Liben, 2011), Lexile text measures were compared to various judgments of text dif-ficulty (e.g., texts mapped to the grade bands in Table 1) and various estimates of student performance. The report concluded that “all of the metrics were reliably, and often highly, correlated with grade level and student performance-based measures

Text complexity is a transaction

between text, reader and task.

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of text difficulty across a variety of reference measures” (p. 46). Lexile measures were moderately correlated with texts selected for inclusion in Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts whose complexity estimate was based on educator judgment; and highly correlated with texts whose complexity estimate was based on empirical data from actual student performances with the texts.

Achieve3000 uses The Lexile Framework for Reading with its cloud-based learning system and LevelSet because of its two-fold advantage of being able to place both readers (ability) and text (difficulty) on the same scale, thereby facilitating the targeting of students with texts of appropriate complexity.

■ Stretch RangesResearchers have examined the text complexity of textbooks used in public education and in the postsecondary world. A striking finding, noted by the CCSS Initiative, is that “while the reading demands of college, workforce training programs, and citizenship have held steady or risen over the past fifty years or so, K–12 texts have, if anything, become less demanding” (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010b, p. 2). Concomitantly, K-12 growth trajectories of students over the past three decades have shown “a tripartite pattern where American students are gaining ground at the pre/early primary school level, holding ground at the middle school level, and losing ground at the high school level” (Lee, 2010, p. 800). This confluence of effects (i.e., less text complexity in K-12, steady or increasing text complexity in postsecondary, and decelerating student perfor-mance across K-12) may be naturally related to the problem of postsecondary readi-ness because a text complexity gap between high school and postsecondary texts has implications for the forecasted reading comprehension of students who enter various postsecondary realms of endeavor (Williamson, 2008).

Postsecondary Reading Demands. In the Journal of Advanced Academics (Summer 2008), Williamson investigated the gap between high school textbooks and various reading materials across several postsecondary domains. The resources Williamson used were organized into four domains that correspond to the three major postsec-ondary endeavors that students can choose—further education, the workplace, or the military—and, the broad area of citizenship, which cuts across all postsecondary endeavors. Williamson discovered a substantial increase in reading expectations and text complexity from high school to these various postsecondary domains— a gap large enough to help account for high remediation rates and disheartening graduation statistics (Smith, 2011).

Expanding on Williamson’s work, Stenner, Koons, and Swartz (2010) aggregated the readability information across the various postsecondary options available to a high school graduate to arrive at a standard of reading needed by individuals to be con-sidered “college and career ready.” In their study, they included additional citizenship materials beyond those examined by Williamson (e.g., national and international news-papers and other adult reading materials such as Wikipedia articles). Using a weighted mean of the medians for each of the postsecondary options (education, military, work place, and citizenship), a measure of 1300L was defined as the general (median) read-ing demand for postsecondary options and could be used to judge a student’s “college and career readiness.”

A measure of 1300L was

defined as the general

(median) reading demand for

postsecondary options and

could be used to judge a

student’s “college and career readiness.”

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In Texas, two studies were conducted to examine the reading demands in various postsecondary options – technical college, community college, and 4-year university programs. Under Commissioner Raymond Paredes, THECB conducted a research study in 2007 (and extended in 2008) which addressed the focal question of “how well does a student need to read to be successful in community colleges, technical col-leges, and universities in Texas?” (MetaMetrics, 2008b). THECB staff collected a sample of books that first year students in Texas would be required to read in each setting. These books were measured in terms of their text complexity using The Lexile Frame-work for Reading. Since the state assessment was linked with Lexile measures at the time, the THECB study was able to overlay the assessment performance standards onto the post high school reading requirements to help students see if they were on track for the demands of college.

Since the THECB study was completed, other states have followed the Texas example and used the same approach in examining the gap from high school to the postsec-ondary world. In 2009, a similar study was conducted for the Georgia Department of Education; and in 2010, a study was conducted for the Tennessee Department of Education. In terms of mean text demand, the results across the three states pro-duced similar estimates of the reading ability needed in higher-education institutions: Texas, 1230L; Georgia, 1220L; and Tennessee, 1260L. When these results are incorpo-rated with the reading demands of other postsecondary endeavors (military; citizen-ship; workplace; and adult reading materials [national and international newspapers] and Wikipedia articles) used by Stenner, Koons, and Swartz (2010), the college and career readiness standard for reading is 1293L. These results are based on more than 105,000,000 words from approximately 3,100 sources from the adult text space.

K-12 Reading Demands. The vast postsecondary text collection can be used to define and anchor what it means to be a college- and career-ready reader. But what are the reading demands at each grade level along the continuum to graduation and post-secondary endeavors? The texts for the MetaMetrics (2008a) text continuum study were obtained from several sources. For the Grade 1 through Grade 12 text demand, commonly adopted textbooks were measured to determine their difficulty (Lexile measure). To identify which textbooks should be included in the study, a survey was conducted of statewide textbook adoption lists. Textbooks that appeared on adoption lists in multiple states were selected for possible inclusion in the study. The assump-tion guiding this process was that textbooks selected for adoption in multiple states were likely to be used by a large number of students. In addition, textbooks were se-lected to represent multiple subject areas to better incorporate the full range of texts a student is likely to encounter in his or her elementary through secondary education. Included in the sample at each grade were health, language arts, literature, mathemat-ics, science and social studies textbooks. When the textbooks occurred in a series, all books in the series were included in the study. A total of 487 textbooks in Grades 1 through 12 were included in the final sample.

In the figure, the “current continuum” is summarized by a curve that is the result of mathematically smoothing the medians of the text distributions in each of Grades 1 through 12. This curve can be envisioned as the “middle” or typical textbook difficulty in each grade. The curve indicates that actual text complexity increases most rapidly during the early years of schooling (Grades 1-5) and less rapidly over the remaining grades, culminating at approximately 1130L at the end of high school.

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Lexi

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Grades321 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Figure 1

The Text Continuum: Median Text Measures (Smoothed)

Current Continuum

“Stretch”Continuum

1,400

1,200

1,000

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0

Bending the Text Demand Curve to Define College and Career Readiness. If the current K-12 text continuum could be “stretched” to ensure additional challenge for students across the public school grades, it might facilitate instructional alignment with postsecondary text demands. One strategy for accomplishing this is to use the existing text continuum (Stenner, Koons & Swartz, 2010) and modify it to increase the trajectory, in alignment with postsecondary texts. Figure 1 shows the result of such an exercise.

However, a higher readability is more typical of postsecondary texts (Williamson, 2008). A weighted average of typical postsecondary texts (e.g., military, citizenship, workplace, community college, university, international newspapers and Wikipedia articles) lies around 1300L, which also happens to closely correspond to the me-dian Community College texts analyzed by Williamson (2008). Suppose the K-12 text continuum “stretched” to 1300L. What would the trajectory look like, if the additional reading demand was allocated across grades in the same relative proportions as it is in the current text continuum? That is what is represented by the “stretch continuum” in the figure. It begins at the same point as the current median text demand in Grade 1 and increases to reach 1300L at Grade 12.

However, previous research (Stenner, et.al, 2010) has shown that there is great vari-ability in the texts at any grade level. What should the within-grade variability look like in the context of the stretch continuum? To provide a possible answer, an assumption needs to be made. One reasonable assumption is that the variability would be at least as large as it is for the current text continuum. If this assumption is imposed on the stretch continuum in Figure 1, the result is the picture in Figure 2.

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Figure 2

“Stretch” Text Distributions by Grade

1,600

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Lexi

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Grades321 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

These two graphs give a vision of what the text continuum “ought to be” to align more effectively with postsecondary demands. If the grade levels are combined into specific grade bands (e.g., Grades 2-3, Grades 4-5, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-10, and Grades 11-12), the result is the stair-step grade bands presented in Table 1 in this paper from Appendix A of the CCSS for English Language Arts.

■ “On Track” for College and Career Readiness using LevelSet Results

Working with Achieve3000 to describe students’ reading performance, MetaMetrics developed a set of national performance standards for Achieve3000 to use. The first phase in developing the Achieve3000 performance standards was to identify prelimi-nary proficient performance levels for each grade (Grades 1-12). That is, the range of scores was determined (in Lexile scale units) that would describe students who were considered on-grade level in their reading ability and exhibited competent perfor-mance when instructed on grade-level appropriate skills and concepts. The proficient performance level for each grade was initially set to correspond with other national and state level performance information that could be reported in the Lexile metric. For example, this information included state performance data from state end-of-year assessments, national performance levels from norm-referenced assessments, and judgmental information related to adult reading levels. Based on a review of this information by educational and assessment specialists, a consensus was established for the proficient performance level at each grade level. These proficient levels were used as starting points to define the ranges associated with the remaining three per-formance levels for each grade level. Setting of these performance levels combined in-formation related to the performance levels observed from previous Lexile Framework linking studies. These levels were refined further based on discussion by educational and assessment specialists.

The current performance standards developed for Grades 1 through 12 are based on

“On track” is defined as…

competent academic

performance when students

read grade-level-appropriate text

and could be considered as

reading “on track for college and

career readiness”

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four performance levels. These levels describe performance on the LevelSet assessment and the differentiated instructional activities where “Meets” describes “on track” reading performance (see Table 2). “On track” is defined as performance that exhibits competent academic performance when students read grade- level-appropriate text and could be considered as reading “on track for college and career readiness” as defined by the Common Core State Standards (Table 1 in this technical paper; and CCSSO and NGA, ELA Appendix A, 2010b). The other three levels (‘Falls Far Below,” “Approaches,” and “Exceeds”) are anchored around the “Meets” performance standard and are consistent with the original performance standard developed for use by Achieve3000.

Table 2 – Revised Achieve3000 LevelSet 4-level performance standards in the Lexile metric


Not On Track On Track

Grade Falls Far Below Approaches Meets Exceeds

1 -111 and Below -110 to 185L 190L to 530L 535L and Above

2 150L and Below 155L – 415L 420L to 650L 655L and Above









11/12 950L and Below 955L – 1180L 1185L to 1385L 1390L and Above

Achieve3000, in conjunction with MetaMetrics, developed a new tool that supports the current emphasis on Col-lege and Workforce readiness and the Common Core Standards: a descriptive report of students’ readiness for college and career based on their current Lexile reading level. The report is a valuable means to identify which students are most in need of support and to plan aggressive intervention where it is most needed.

Additionally, users of the system will also find a new “College and Career readiness” symbol throughout the exist-ing reports. This symbol is used to provide a quick visual indication of which students are on-track for college and career. These tools provide crucial instructional planning information for teachers and administrators.

The Achieve3000 College- and Career-readiness report references information from a student’s performance on LevelSet and activities reported in the Lexile metric from the web-based instructional systems (Achieve3000, 2010). The student’s Lexile measure is then compared with the Achieve3000 performance standards presented in Table 2 above. Students with current Lexile measures classified as “Falls Far Below” or “Approaches” are con-sidered “Not On Track” to be ready for the reading demands of college and the workforce. Students with current Lexile measures classified as “Meets” or “Exceeds” are considered “On Track” for the reading demands of college and the workforce.

To learn more about Achieve3000 and its proven solutions, call 888-968-6822 or e-mail [email protected]

METAMETRICS® and the METAMETRICS® logo and tagline are trademarks of MetaMetrics, Inc., and are registered in the United States and abroad. The trademarks and names of other companies and products mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2012 MetaMetrics, Inc. All rights reserved.

ReferencesLee, J. (2010). Tripartite growth trajectories of reading and math achievement: Tracking national academic progress at primary, middle, and high school levels. American Educational Research Journal, 47(4), 800-832.

MetaMetrics, Inc. (2008a). The text continuum in 2008. Presented at the Lexile National Conference, San Antonio, TX.

MetaMetrics, Inc. (2008b). Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board: Text measurement and analysis. Retrieved on December 1, 2008 from www.thecb.state.tx.us/index.cfm?objectid=31BFFF6B-BB41-8A43-C76A99EDA0F38B7D.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) & the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). (2010a). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) & the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). (2010b). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects: Appendix A. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_A.pdf

Nelson, J., Perfetti, C., Liben, D., & Liben, M. (2011). Measures of text difficulty: Testing their predictive value for grade levels and student performance. New York: Student Achievement Partners.

Smith, M. (2011, March 30). Bending the Reading Growth Trajectory: Instructional Strategies to Promote Reading Skills and Close the Readiness Gap. MetaMetrics Policy Brief. Durham, NC: MetaMetrics, Inc.

Stenner, J., Koons, H., & Swartz, C. W. (unpublished manuscript). Text complexity and developing expertise in reading. Durham, NC: MetaMetrics, Inc.

United States Department of Education (USED). (2009, November). Race to the Top Program Executive Summary. Re-trieved from http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/executive-summary.pdf

Williamson, G. L. (2008). A text readability continuum for postsecondary readiness. Journal of Advanced Academics, 19 (4), 602-632.

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Are my students on track for College and Career Readiness?