3/11/2020

Lexia Helps Alabama Students Meet State-Mandated Literacy Goals

The pressure is on for Alabama’s educators and students with the passage of the Alabama Literacy Act (ALA). This bold legislation mandates holding back third graders who are not reading at grade level according to state testing. 

It’s projected that as many as 10,000 third grade students in Alabama may not meet this benchmark when the 2020-21 test results come in. With the stakes so high, some educators are understandably concerned. 

At Lexia, we can help you accelerate literacy gains for all of your students and prevent the retention of your struggling readers.
 

How Lexia Helps

Lexia® Core5® Reading — Lexia’s personalized literacy instructional program — supports and aligns with the goals of the ALA to help students become proficient readers and confident learners. Designed for students of all abilities in grades Pre-K–5, Lexia’s research-proven program provides explicit, systematic, and personalized learning in the six areas of reading instruction. Core5 targets skill gaps as they emerge, providing teachers with the data and student-specific resources they need for individual and small-group instruction. 

Core5 supports teachers with:

• real time assessment without testing

• personalized learning paths

• supplemental instruction materials for individual and small-group instruction

• data-driven, easy-to-implement interventions

Students Make Progress Through Personalized Learning
 

Core5 is built to support the needs of each student and adapts instruction based on students responses. Each activity incorporates instructional branching, which allows students to work independently, providing immediate support only when needed and advancing students when they demonstrate proficiency. Progress bars, animations, and the ability to repeat directions further strengthen students’ self-monitoring and executive functioning skills. To support autonomy for English language learners, directions for Core5 are available in Spanish, Mandarin, Haitain Creole, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Portuguese.
 

Assessment Without Testing®
 

As students work within Core5, real-time performance data is collected through Lexia’s patented embedded assessment tool, Assessment Without Testing?, which collects student data from the program with every click of the mouse, providing ongoing progress monitoring for all students without a formal test event. Teachers can monitor student gains and their trajectory toward year-end goals.

Reaching these grade level benchmarks is highly predictive of outcomes on commonly used assessments. This actionable data is accessed via the educator website, myLexia.com. Using these reports, administrators can monitor reading gains over time at the district, school, grade, and class levels, and teachers can monitor individual students’ progress and growth.

Teacher Support
 

Teachers can access the data from myLexia.com to inform their small group instruction through scripted, targeted offline materials for face-to-face instruction and practice for their struggling, on-level, and advanced students.

Lexia Skill Builders are paper and pencil activities designed to reinforce and extend skills mastered online, allowing students to continue to build independence, automaticity, and expand expressive skills.

Lexia Lessons are scripted lesson plans for face-to-face instruction that allow for explicit and direct instruction when students struggle with a specific skill. Lexia Lessons are automatically recommended for individuals and small groups of students based on performance in the online activity.

Lexia Instructional Connections provide strategies and numerous activity ideas for individual students or for group work. Activities can be used to introduce, reinforce, or extend skills.

All of these Lexia instructional materials can fit seamlessly into existing classroom models. While some students receive direct instruction from the teacher, using Lexia Lessons, other students can practice skills using Lexia Skill Builders. Students can also work collaboratively to reinforce concepts using activity ideas from Lexia Instructional Connections.

Teachers often lack time and resources to adapt their instruction for students of all abilities. With Core5’s targeted resources, teachers can address each student’s specific needs and provide direct instruction to those students who need it most.
 

Your Success is Our Success
 

No two schools have the exact same needs—that's why Lexia's Success Partnerships are customizable and can be delivered through a variety of flexible models for different learner types. To achieve your school or district's unique goals, Lexia’s team of implementation experts partner with you to develop a year-long, personalized implementation plan that takes your student population and professional learning needs into account.

With Lexia Implementation Services you are fully supported from day one, making the process as seamless as possible. From technical set-up guidance and on-site training, to organizing, scheduling, and delivering web-based professional learning sessions, we set you up for success. Online, self-paced training courses in areas like the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy give teachers the extra boost of confidence they need to meet the demands of the new law. 

Lexia Academy supports educators’ professional growth with self-paced, meaningful, and relevant learning opportunities—anytime, anywhere. Courses are structured with incremental learning segments to help busy educators of all levels immediately apply their newly acquired skills in the classroom.

Our multimodal learning formats are designed to facilitate direct application and bolster knowledge acquisition. You can learn about literacy instruction best practices via interactive content including videos delivered by our literacy experts, and reinforce learning with digital badges, printable instructional resources, and course completion certificates.

To preview a class on the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy, click here!
 

Alabama Core5 Success Stories
 

At Dean Road Elementary School, the Lexia research team evaluated students in grades K–2 using Core5 in the  2016-2017 school year. Students’ scores on the spring 2017 Star assessments were strongly correlated with their performance in Core5, with 72% of students identified as At or Above Benchmark on DIBELS Next. These same students also reached their benchmark in Core5 by the end of the year.

At Prattville Primary School, with the use of Core5, students’ reading scores are no longer hovering as they were before—rather they are improving greatly. The number of students working in or above grade level in Core5 nearly doubled from 50% to 93%, and the number of students working below grade level in Core5 decreased from 50% to 7% in less than one school year (more here).

“Core5 enables our teachers to provide differentiated instruction without a lot of additional effort on their part. The program exposes skill gaps in individual students and provides our teachers with Lexia Lessons to address those gaps. This saves them hours of preparation time and lets them focus on the individual needs of their students.”
 

—Tammy Starnes

Principal

Prattville Primary School, Alabama