Teachers, administrators, and parents recognize the first few years of school as critical to children’s later school success, especially in the area of reading. That’s why more than 20 percent of all Wyoming students in such school districts as Laramie, Natrona, and Sweetwater, along with Carbon and Converse County School Districts 1 and 2 have implemented the Lexia Reading program as an essential component of their reading curriculum.
Lexia Reading offers a technology-based system of differentiated skills practice, embedded assessment, and targeted instruction, designed to advance reading skills development in all students pre-K through fourth grade, and intensify and accelerate learning for at-risk students in grades 4–12. Statistics gathered in a recent national query found that 87% of K–3 at-risk students using Lexia Reading advanced one or more grade levels to finish the year working on grade level material.
“We had 94 percent of my at-risk students meet their NWEA Measures of Academic Progress® growth rate while 78 percent met grade level proficiency using Lexia Reading,” said Wendy Gamble, reading intervention specialist, Converse County School District 1. “This program is priceless —and the data speaks for itself. This program is a remarkable reading instructional tool that delivers what it promises.”
Evansville Elementary School in the Natrona School District recently purchased Lexia Reading as the school’s foundational reading software for all students, as well as a primary intervention tool for all struggling readers. Sweetwater District administrators have expanded the use of the software program to include three of its six elementary schools. In all, nearly 9,000 Wyoming students and counting are enrolled in Lexia.
In addition to supporting foundational skills development, the program also reduces schools’ dependence on traditional testing methods and helps improve each student’s performance on grade-level assessments. Lexia Reading’s Assessment Without Testing provides real-time data on students’ specific skill gaps, as well as norm-referenced predictions of each student’s percent chance of reaching the end-of-year benchmark. The program then automatically identifies and prioritizes students for small group or individual instruction, providing educators with targeted instructional strategies and structured lesson plans to help each student improve performance on grade-level assessments. This compilation of student performance data is all done without administering a test, allowing schools to spend less time testing and reclaim weeks of instructional time.
“We love Lexia because it pinpoints the knowledge deficiency immediately and addresses student skill gaps. It automatically provides teachers with a set of explicit, scripted lesson plans and paper and pencil practice sheets for targeted skill instruction and offline practice,” said Gamble. “It gives us insight into where our students are struggling, but it doesn’t stop there – it gives us all the necessary data and resource tools needed to be successful teachers, which means our students will be successful readers. Other programs seem to miss the mark and never get to the heart of the student’s struggles, Lexia does just that.”
A selected winner of both District Administration’s Readers’ Choice Top 100 products and the eSchool News 2012 Readers’ Choice awards, Lexia Reading includes more than 900 age-appropriate activities that conform to federal guidelines and align to Common Core State Standards. The software delivers scaffolded practice, advancing students to higher levels as they demonstrate proficiency while focusing on the five major areas of reading instruction. Students using the Web-based, SIF certified program work independently as the software automatically differentiates the content to match each student’s skill level, detecting when additional practice is needed and advancing students to the next level when skills have been mastered. The software quickly identifies students at risk for reading failure, highlighting specific skill deficits and aggregating student performance data at the student, class, school, or district level.
“One of the biggest challenges we as educators face is the process of gathering meaningful student data without having to invest what we seldom have enough of—time and money—and administering tests,” added Gamble. “Lexia Reading provides teachers and reading specialists like myself first-hand, detailed, meaningful data we need for delivering differentiated and targeted instruction that will undoubtedly prepare this next generation of students for academic success.”
