Assessment | News

Lexia Partners with Florida Center for Reading Research To Speed up Assessment

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 03/27/14

Lexia Learning is partnering with the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) in an effort to streamline literacy assessments.

"A recent Lexia survey of more than 7,000 educators showed that teachers spend the equivalent of 17 instructional days administering, scoring, recording and analyzing reading assessments," according to a company news release. "Through collaborative research and development with FCRR, Lexia will provide a more time-efficient assessment to help teachers reclaim almost a month of instructional time for teaching, not testing."

Scheduled for availability later this year, the jointly developed assessments are designed to be administered three times per academic year in an effort to identify student needs and provide teachers with strategies to address them on an individual basis. Monthly assessments for progress monitoring will also be available.

"Backed by federal grants from the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) to Florida State University, the new assessments provide precise and efficient estimates of students' language and reading abilities in grades pre-kindergarten through 12," said Barbara Foorman, author and principal investigator on the grants, in a prepared statement.

"The technology-based assessment will provide an adaptive experience that requires students to respond to fewer test items in order to reach a highly valid and reliable ability score for each student,"  added co-authors Yaacov Petscher and Chris Schatschneider, both of FCRR. "As a result, the assessment process will become more time-efficient and keep students engaged at the proper level of challenge. "

Established in 2002, "the Florida Center for Reading Research is a multidisciplinary research center at Florida State University," according to information on the center's site. With 17 research contracts and grants, the center employs nine faculty members and more than 550 staff, ranging from doctoral fellows to undergraduate students. More information about FCRR is available at fcrr.org.

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