Student Reading Levels - As of January 2015

Part of my baseline information is the Lexile reading levels of my students.  This year, our English department offers four levels to our juniors: Advanced Placement, Advanced, Regular, and EMA (Emerging Acheivers).  As mentioned in an earlier blog, the class I have chosen for this project is a an EMA class.  Throughout the course of the year, my students have been given the STAR test four times (3 in the fall and once in January)  The STAR test is also new to our school this year as it replaced the MAP test.   I have taken the January test results to determine lexile reading levels of each student in this study and included this information in the chart below:

As you can clearly see, according to this assessment, the majority of this class reads on a 6th grade level, and not one of the students is reading on a high school level.

My next step is to complete the San Diego Quick Assessment (SDQA) for all students in the study to the two.  I can't wait to see what the comparison reveals.

The SDQA measures a student's ability to read and recognize grade-level words as they are viewed out of context.  The test consists of 13 lists of equally difficult words that correspond to designated grade levels.  When conducting this test, the proctor is to begin with a list that is 2 or 3 levels below the reading level of the student.  As the student reads each list, the examiner is to note which and how many of the words in the list that the student mispronounces.  Once errors begin, they can be interpreted as follows:

1 error  = Independent Reading Level
2 errors = Instructional Reading Level
3 errors = Frustrating Reading Level

Today, I was able to give the SDQA  to student #4 and found that there was certainly a correlation between the two assessments with this student.  Her Lexile level score on the STAR test indicates that she reads on a 5th grade level, and when reading the words below, she went from reading independently with the 4th grade words but shot straight to the frustration level with the 5th grade words.  I feel like these are so close that when looking at the two, I have a fairly solid understanding of where she it.  It's nice to know this and makes me really excited to see what this reveals with the other 20 students in my study!