Accelerating Literacy Development with Lexile Tools and Teacher Resources

Presented by Jill Fitzgerald, Research Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Alexandra Lewis, Instructional Designer, VirtualSC, and former Fourth- and Second-Grade Teacher, South Carolina Department of Education; and Alistair Van Moere, Ph.D., Chief Product Officer, MetaMetrics

Sponsored by MetaMetrics

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Each year, more than 35 million students receive Lexile measures from instructional programs and classroom or state assessments. Yet, many educators and students do not take advantage of all the research and freely available resources that make Lexiles actionable. In this edWebinar, hear the ways Lexile measures allow teachers to link assessment to instruction to accelerate the development of student literacy skills.

The Lexile® Framework for Reading places students, books and instructional content all on the same scale to match students with resources at their level, allowing teachers to individualize instruction. New research and tools also assist teachers in all grade levels, from looking up a book’s decodability and vocabulary (elementary students) to checking the Lexile demands for entering vocations and professional careers (middle and high school students).

In this recorded edWebinar, viewers will learn:

• About the Lexile Framework for Reading and how to make assessment results actionable
• Ways to use Lexile measures to match readers to text and individualize instruction
• Strategies to accelerate critical vocabulary development for students
• How to use free tools and resources that support using Lexiles with their students

This recorded edWebinar will be of interest to preK-12 teachers and librarians,

About the Presenters

Jill Fitzgerald is a former primary grades teacher. She studies literacy issues for native-English-speaking and multilingual children. Her current research interests focus on academic language in textbooks and in children’s writing. She has published more than 100 works, has been an invited speaker at national and international conferences, and has received over $1.7 million in grants. She is a member of the Reading Hall of Fame and an American Educational Research Association Fellow. She has won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Review of Research Award and the International Reading Association’s Dina Feitelson Award for Research. Jill is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Educational Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of several national and international journals. She has been a review panelist for several federal organizations including the Office of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institute of Health, and the National Institute for Literacy.

Alexandra Lewis began her teaching career as a fourth-grade teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a Teach For America corps member, and later earned her associate in Orton-Gillingham instruction and taught as an Orton-Gillingham instructor to students of all ages with dyslexia. She recently earned her master’s in educational innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently working as an instructional designer for VirtualSC. During her master’s program, Alexandra interned with MetaMetrics, using its tools daily in classroom instruction. As an intern, she helped to design and build the Lexile and Quantile Teacher Certification Courses, which empower educators to use Lexile and Quantile measures to make data-driven decisions that can guide classroom instruction.

Dr. Alistair Van Moere is Chief Product Officer at MetaMetrics where he drives innovation in assessments and helps organizations make sense of measurement and test scores. Before joining MetaMetrics in 2017, he was President of Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies group, where he managed artificial intelligence scoring services for speaking and writing. He also oversaw development and delivery of standardized assessments for tens of millions of learners. Dr. Van Moere has worked as a teacher, examiner, director of studies, university lecturer, and test developer in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and Thailand. He has a Master of Arts in English language teaching, a doctorate in language testing, and a Master of Business Administration. He is frequently an invited speaker at conferences and has authored over 20 research publications with a focus on educational technology and language assessments.

Closed captioning will be added to the recording within 2 weeks of the live presentation.

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MetaMetrics offers the only scientifically valid, universal scales for measuring silent and oral reading and listening (Lexile) and math (Quantile) with plans to develop measures for writing. The Lexile and Quantile Frameworks measure student ability and the complexity of the content they encounter. For more information, visit metametricsinc.com.