The lexile leap: Consequences for foundational skills and accountability achievement

Abstract

Foundational skills are important to reading success. Additionally, U.S. Core Reading Standards recommend text complexity grade-bands extending from second- through twelfth-grade as a measure of reading growth. The idea means that students must increase their reading skills as they progress across grades and that text complexity offers a reasonable metric for gauging such growth. A challenge with the text-complexity bands is both their breadth and their large increase between third- and fourth-grade. We present a text-complexity heuristic mapping growth in foundational skills across the elementary grades that provides a more fine-grained perspective for tracking reading development. We next present empirical evidence supporting the heuristic, which shows that students who reach foundational skill criteria by the end of third-grade are much more likely to achieve end-of-year reading proficiency than peers who are less-than-proficient readers.