Reading levels

Sorry but more questions, what is the definitions of the following terms? Pre-primer, primer, proficient, literate. I quess the question is what grade level is considered profient? At what grade level are you considered literate? Shouldn’t everyone by definition graduate high school at a 12th grade reading level to be considered literate? I think my son hitting high school has really got me nervous, sorry about asking so many questions.

It would be more interesting to know the “av erage level” of the kids in *your* school — or at least with kids with similar plans for hte future.

There are lots of versions of this kind of information but it doesn’t mean a whole lot because of questions like: How are they tested? (Group, individual, *which* specific ‘standardized’ test?) Are any groups excluded from the results? (“average” ninth graders but not counting anybody wiht a sped label? Just public school?)

You’re right, there are *lots* of mixed messages. It’s best not to sweat over the statistics and focus on the learning.

Sue according to the special ed teacher my son when compared to his local peers (ie the kids in this district) reads at least 2 grade levels below his peers. He has had both group reading tests scores (from the MAT7 and MAT8) and individual reading test scores. He consistantally scores 2-3 grade levels behind in reading. His comphrension is higher then his vocabulary and word identification skills. He has come up with excellent coping strategies to help him do well in his classes. They feel and I agree that it is in his best interest to take all regular education classes with modifications, plus have a resource hour to address reading, organization, and study skills. He is doing well with his health class this semester due to the way it is taught. He still has difficulty with the reading but is more willing to try the assignments on his own. As a matter of fact he did the last assignment on his own using his coping strategies and the like 1st before asking for help. There were 22 questions, he was able to find the answer to all but 4 on his own. When I reworded the 4 questions so he could understand he could answer them all without looking in the book! He read his last test on his own and scored a 73, he was very pleased with himself. He has opted to do this course with little help as possible, his teacher is not even aware of his LD status.

Sounds like this is the best plan for him. I’d give special attention to vocabulary — but regular ed. classes will have *lots* of vocabulary to learn so you won’t have a problem finding stuff to work on… and it sounds like he’s able and willing to work on this learning thing :) Getting a solid 73 independently is great… though I’d look for a way to get tests read to him in a way that wasn’t obvious (I’ve known kids to get pretend tests that they sit down and write on while the other kids take the test, taking the “real thing” either earlier or later in the resource room).

And to top it all off he won’t have to take Health :)

I hope that he is being taught how to read. Don’t expect the resourse teacher to teach him.

Good questions and you deserve a serious answer.

Yes, mixed messages. Some are unavoidable, and some are pious hopes, and some are a result of bad decisions in the past.

Unavoidable:

First of all, human beings vary, which is good because we wouldn’t want a world full of clones of ourselves, would we?
So there will always be a range of ability (or height or shoe size or anything else) in any group.

Statistically, the “average” group is taken to be those within the first standard deviation, which includes about 68% of the population, grouped around the center or average. There is about another 16% below average and 16% above average, so from sixteenth to eighty-fourth percentile is considered average. The rule you read is actually a little more limited than this; your rule is taking the central 50% as average with 25% below and 25% above; when you divide into 25% groups like this they are called “quartiles”. So even by this more limited rule, yes your son places in the average or normal range.

The average level of students entering Grade 9 is very close to 9.0, and the average level of students leaving Grade 12 is very close to 12.9, and these numbers have to be so, because that’s how these grade levels are defined. BUT these averages are taken over the entire USA, including disintegrated inner-city schools with ceilings falling in and unqualified teachers and 50% daily absentee rates, and including the poorest rural schools with no books and no expectations and also unqualified teachers. In a wealthy suburb with all the advantages, the school - town - district will generally have a local average that is above the national average. College-bound students will generally be at or above the national average; if they are much below, they find college very difficult.

Result of bad decisions:

You say that according to the information you have, that means the typical ninth grade class has students reading from fifth to tenth grade levels; actually it’s more than that, from fifth (four below) to college (four above). Yep. You’re spot on. Guess why the teachers here gnash their teeth in frustration? Guess why they don’t have time for all those things that parents want them to do? Guess why many kids are lost in their classes and come home saying they don’t understand a word, and the teacher says she can’t help it?

The problem here is called a high “variance”, which means scores spread very widely.
You see, if you don’t really teach much reading in the beginning but rely on hope-and-guess, some kids get a lot of help from their parents and so on and they really learn to read, and others don’t catch on to the idea for several years and then miss out on some necessary skills. So kids arrive at Grade 9 anywhere from college level to good high school level to not reading at all (see Shay’s posts about her classes of grade 11 non-readers). Add to ineffective methodologies enforced by curriculum planners the policy of “social promotion” — if you are fourteen years old you must be in Grade 9, whatever your skills — and you get an even wider spread. This spread will never go away, but it could be reduced from four years each way to two or maybe three by better teaching of basics, effective early tutoring of students who fall behind before they get lost, and less stress on age for placement.
Think about it, now we have reading levels of 5 to 13 in one class but everyone is fourteen years old; might it not work better to have reading levels of 7 to 11 and not worry if the ages ranged from thirteen to fifteen? Social promotion comes from the idea of the school as a social environment; if you wanted a more academic environment, you would adjust placement by academic skills. But this is impossible at present because everyone is so focused on age and social grouping by class and age.

Pious hopes:

You keep reading the advice that your child should be reading on grade level to get the most out of class. Absolutely right. It would certainly be nice, and teachers could do a heck of a lot more if they got classes where all the students read on or at least close to grade level. In the present situation, this isn’t going to happen. It won’t happen until there are some basic philosophical changes in the educational establishment. (so, run for school board or state government …)

Now, the difference between averages and individuals. We know that there will be variation in any group, some who read better and some worse, some who do math better, some who sing better, draw better, fix cars better, and so on. As an individual rather than a group, it is to your benefit to manoeuver yourself to be in a group where you’re average or above. In the case of reading, you can improve your child’s reading skills with intensive tutoring. Or if he feels overwhelmed you can arrange for him to repeat a class — if he raises his reading level to 8.0 and then repeats Grade 9 English, for example, he will get a lot more out of it and feel more in control. By high school any decision of this sort has to be shared by the student, but some students do see the benefit of taking time to get on top of things.

By the way, the health class you describe is exactly what he needs not only to learn health, but also to improve his reading. There is nowhere near enough real teaching (shared reading, discussion, etc.) in schools, and far too much paper-shuffling. Next year, you or a tutor can read his texts in all his subjects with him, and this will really help his reading level.

As for “perfectly acceptable” — depends who’s talking. Administrators have set up their own systems and hate to rock the boat, so many (not all, but very many) administrators find it perfectly acceptable to graduate a total illiterate, as long as he doesn’t cause trouble. Teachers hate to pass on students who are not well-prepared, but are forced by the system to do so.

Lisa: you ask a heck of a lot of good questions! I am going to try to answer them as well as possible.

Please note that all of these answers are subject to interpretation. Each school, and more important each state and provincial government, sets up it own rules, policies, and laws, and the interpretations vary depending on who wrote the policy. I will give general answers, but you have to check with your local people.

Easy questions: “Pre-Primer” is the very very first reading book, given at the beginning of grade 1 or even in kindergarten. It usually has very limited vocabulary and a lot of pictures. Unfortunately it is usually taught by pure brute memorization, starting kids off on a bad habit for life. The old “Look, look! See, see! See Spot! See Spot run!” that everyone makes fun of was a pre-primer. The “whole-language” pre-primers are just as repetitive with less reasoned choice of vocabulary; one that I saw was the “One little — two little — three little Indians” song, but changed from Indians to bears for political correctness (and thus losing the rhythm that made the original fun); it went all the way up to ten and then back down, pretty extensive repetition.
A child said to be reading on a pre-primer level has memorized twenty or thirty words by sight and guesses and looks at pictures a lot.

“Primer” (often pronounced unphonetically as “primmer”) was originally supposed to be the first preparatory book (hence the name), before in the 1950’s the system was made more and more complex. A primer will have 50 to 100 vocabulary words, still lots of repetition and pictures.
A child said to be reading on primer level has memorized around 100 words of vocabulary and still guesses and looks at pictures a lot.

“First Reader” follows Primer, and is the first “real” book most kids get. If they are on schedule they start it after Christmas of Grade 1. There are stories with some sort of plot, a few pages long. The vocabulary goes up to between 200 and 400 words in general. It is hoped (but rarely taught) that children will be able to read endings of s, ed, and ing. It is hoped (and vaguely taught) that children will be able to sound out short-vowel words.

Proficient: this is a term that is used on a standardized test, the Stanford 9 I think. Instead of giving pass-fail grades, which are too vague, or ABC which are subject to too much interpretation, them rtest-makers decided to give meaningfiul words as measures. The scores are Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and (I think) Advanced. Proficient is supposed to mean that the child’s skills are close enough to grade level to be able to do all the work exppected in class. Advanced is supposed to mean that the child is well above grade level. Basic is supposed to mean that the child is below grade level, but able to do the majority of the work with some help. Below Basic is supposed to mean that the child is simply so far behind that he cannot do any meaningful work in the grade he is assigned. (By the way, when students in Washington DC were tested, the majority, from 60% to 80% of students on various tests, scored Below Basic — that is what I mean by a disintegrated school system.)

Literate is a tricky one. Literally of course it means able to read. When reading was generally taught phonetically anyway and when reading material was very limited, basic knowledge was enough to be considered literate.
Nowadays we have different levels of literacy. Some people try to make the situation worse by adding into literacy the concepts of numeracy (ability to deal with numbers) and computer literacy etc., but let’s keep it as simple as we can.
The term “functional literacy” is used for being able to read well enough to manage normal life schools such as shopping, travel, and general job skills. To be functionally literate, a person has to be able to fill out a job application, write a cheque, read instructions such as those on a cake mix or directions on the washer in the laundromat, read the large print on food lables, use a bus/subway map in the city, read street signs, and take the driver’s licence test, etc. (A note to the word-memorization folks — even this level clearly goes far over a 2000 word vocabulary, and yes, even to get here you need phonics, or you’ll never get thos street names, food names, …) It used to be assumed that functional literacy was around Grade 3; with dropping school reading levels and increasing real-world reading demands, it’s now around Grade 5.
High-school level literacy and college-level literacy include *both* larger vocabulary and more difficult levels of comprehension. Functional literacy requires simple factual comprehension and one-word or simple sentencewriting, high school literacy requires ability to interpret and make inferences and to write a short essay, and college literacy involves more difficult inferences and the ability to create high-quality original writing.

I mentioned variation in my other answer to your interesting questions. Graduates from Grade 12 will normally vary somewhat; I would consider reading levels from 10 to 14 (college) quite reasonable. A high school graduate with a Grade 10 reading level will often have skills in other fields and/or coping methods and this is within reasonable limits.
I do not like to see people graduating from high school with less than Grade 10 reading level, but it’s happening all the time. Then the colleges are having to take up the slack. In junior colleges, the *majority* of entering freshmen now take one or more “developmental” classes. These are what used to be called remedial classes. They are required for students who enter college with either reading or math below Grade 9 (yes, 9) level on the college placement tests; Grade 10 or above is enough to go on to college work. If a huge proportion of kids are leaving high school at the level of the average entering, yes, we do have a problem. It’s a systemic problem, and it’s continent-wide. Now, the colleges are running into the brick wall that these kids have never failed and it looks bad if the colleges stop them, so there is pressure to raise pass rates and push them through (and then the four-year universities and working world get them and so it fgoes)

For your own child, work to avoid being one of these statistics. For the system, work on your state/provincial politicians.

Victoria, would you point out an example of a pre-primer level reading lesson, and of a primer-level one? For illustration purposes. Thanks!

Yours truly,
Kathy G.

Lisa,

When a child is in the earlier grades, two grade levels can mean the difference between virtual non-readers and those able to read chapter books. Lots of the “reading on grade-level comments” refer to this educational phase rather than high school. Much of the reading research from the l970’s and l980’s pointed toward elementary-age kids who were markedly behind in their reading skills—theyrarely ever caught up with non-impaired readers.

When students approach high school, the range is less more broad and the differences may be less noticeable. For example, a student might be asked for the definition of indefatiguable rather than fatigue. (I’m not discounting the importance of reading on grade level—just looking at the statistical side of this issue.

I believe we also must be careful about looking at grade-level equivilence in scores. It isn’t very statistically accurate. Standard scores are much more reliable—percentiles, too. Reason: As others have said, whose curricula shall we use to measure what one should know at a given grade level?

You ask good questions; for students in reg. ed. or inclusion, I think local standards measured by curriculum based assessment are the most important. The state-sponsored high-stakes assessments will measure students against their peers. The question to ask is what is the reading level(in percentile form if possible) of students in your child’s school system.

Thank you all so very much for the insight, it sure makes things more clear. I knew there was varience in each grade but just was not sure just how much. Both my boys are at the bottom of the pack for their grades both being 2-3 grade levels behind but their sister is 3-4 above. She complains about being bored because the teachers have to keep repeating ect. She does not qualify as gifted though because according to the Otis lenon her school ability index is 102, but she consistantly scores between the 70th-95th percentile on achievement tests and got straight A’s on her report card since starting school. Her favorite subject is science, but her highest scores are always on math and thinking skills, I can see why school would be boring for the 3 of them, none are really being taught to their level. I truly can appriciatte how difficult it is for the teachers with such varience and will continue to do my part to help the situation out. Thanks again all you have been great.

Lisa,

Pre-primer refers to reading below Kindergarten level and Primer would be Kindergarten level. Depending on the test, the words “proficient” and “literate”
could refer to any grade level. A reader is proficient at different levels on different tests. The terms aren’t specific to any one thing.

Okay, without being nosy, what grade-level is your child? What tests does his/her reading teacher use to diagnose and correct reading problems? What problems have been detected and what is the proposed Rx? How do you know that your child isn’t a FSIQ of 90+? Are the index scores very different?

If you aren’t comfortable answering on the board, you may email me directly if you wish—or not answer at all.

Up until the late 20th century reading programs offered a kindergarten level component: readiness.

In first grade the first three readers were short and always paperback. They were called preprimers and roughly corresponded to about the first trimester of first grade. The 4th reader was the first hard cover and it was called the primer, roughly the middle trimester of first grade and the final reader was also hardcover and called the first reader.

Second grade and third grade readers were usually two per year: 2-1, 2-2, 3-1 and 3-2. From grade 4 on there was generally one much thicker basal reader per year.

We still refer to very early first grade level as preprimer.

However, the first grade curriculum continues to be pushed down into kindergarten, begun sometime in the latter quarter of the 20th century. So, by now it might be accurate to state that many times preprimer level reading is taught in kindergarten when it was always previously considered the domain of first grade, for years and years and years.

In the olden days we may have referred to anything below PP level as either readiness or K.

I don’t mind answering at all. His last IQ scores done in 4th grade showed a FSIQ of 95, his verbal was 92, his performance 100. He is currently going in 9th grade. On the MAT7 given toward the end of 8th grade his reading score was at the 6.5 level overall. When he finished up with his reading tutor mid 8th grade due to scheduling conflicts on his individual reading test he also scored at about the mid 6th grade level. I don’t remember which test she gave and cant currently find it. I do know that his preplacement test with her placed him at the 4th grade level so his post test score of mid sixth grade was actually pretty good. We plan on starting with tutoring again when school starts. The reading teacher and special ed teacher plan on getting together to come up with a program. He will get some individual reading instruction during his resource time but I am not sure which program they will use yet. Actually I have noticed even an increase over the summer. He is better able to read his health text on his own although some of it is still difficult. I feel this shows he is very able to be remediated if we all work as a team to get him there. When I find out what program they will use I will let you all on the board know and you can tell me what you think. I truly do appriciatte all your input. Also to share with you all my youngest son has also continued to make progress in his reading and was recently found to be at the 3.0 level he will be entering 4th this fall. Both boys have now started to read on their own for pleasure now that they have experienced some success.

As a mom, when he was first learning to read, did you observe him having trouble with correctly saying words he saw on the page or did that come easier than comprehension?
Speech or language issues?
Other learning issues?
What do you feel his problems are now? Rate/accuracy? Reading vocabulary? Word recognition? (All of the above…)

So would this discussion explain why my son didn’t actually score badly on achievement tests (about a half year below grade level equivalent) but for all practical purposes reads at a much lower level than his peers. (many of whom were early readers, and clearly read above grade level) ?? Also, the woodcock johnson pegged him at 1.9 reading level, while his tutor says he’s at preprimer/primer. No wonder I can’t get a handle on how severe his disability is!!

The gap for him between his skills, and what his friends can read, even if technically he’s not far behind grade level, has produced a tremendous amount of anxiety and reading avoidance behavior.

In a nutshell, yes — but basically anything less than second grade is for all practical purposes a “non-reader” for the demands of middle and high school. Statistically at that bottom range, some right answers based on luck or background knowledge can make one test look somewhat different than the other (so getting a few very basic sight words can bump you up to “1.9” when you basically have no reading skills).

OK, from my *old* Ladybird Key Words (the new one is not good, alas)
These are rough, from memory (but after teaching this stuff a few times you do know it pretty well — ahh, repeated reading)

Pre-Primer 1 (Level 1, 17 words)

Peter is in the shop.
Jane is in the shop.
The dog is in the shop.
Peter has a ball.
Jane has a ball and the dog has a ball.

(In this program, each sentence is on a separate page with a picture)

Pre-Primer 2 (Level 2, total 42 words)

Peter says, Look at this!
Come here Jane, look at this!

(By this point, there are a few sentences on each page with the picture)

Primer (Level 4, total around 100 words)

Jane says “I can see the rabbits.”
Peter says “The dog can see the rabbits. Do not let the dog jump up.”

(By this point there are several sentences per page and full punctuation etc.)

Yes, he has had difficulty since very early childhood. When I first tried to bring it up I was told “you are a over concerned parent, he is doing fine.” Some how mysteriously in 3rd grade he all of a sudden was not fine, the school insisted they thought he was ADHD. We had him evaluated in 3rd grade for this, Docs conclusion NO ADHD. Schools response was he must be lazy. We had him tested again in 4th and again was told no to ADHD, finally the 3rd time around in 5th grade he was dx’d ADD, inattentive type. We tried various medications which did nothing but put him to sleep. In 5th grade the LD specialist was helping some other students in my sons class and she observed my son and felt more then ADD was going on and she requested to test him. Since they already had the IQ testing and achievement testing, she asked for a speech language eval which was never done before, low and behold they found some of his scores to be as low as the 1st perecentile rank. We were again refered to outside specialist. The ADHD specialist who saw him felt he had CAPD. Due to scheduling he was not tested for this until 6th grade when he received his dx of CAPD. His 6th grade teacher did not believe in this DX and told us our son was lazy, and that if we medicated his ADHD and got him “intense counseling” he would be better off. Luckily at the begining of 7th grade we moved to a new district. I provided them with all the documentation from the other district. They said this child should of been receiving LD services for a very long time. He was placed in a mix of LD and mainstream classes (middle school), they retested some areas and went to work. His writing skills have improved very dramactically, his organization skills are somewhat better, and his reading in the 2 years we have been here went from 3rd grade level to 6.5. I do believe his CAPD does play a major role in is difficulty picking up reading, that is my belief any way. Sorry this was so long but thought if you had back round that would help. Thanks for listening and helping out.

Lisa:

Back in my old parent days, I’d have probably been running down the halls waving my child complaint stick. (One can’t wave a due process stick unless one has $50K or a pro bono attorney to back it up!) Neither ever did me much good…

I’m glad your son is making progress. I’m interesting in getting more specific information on various CAPD segments and then on different non-academic interventions for them.

I believe that you need to get inside that language evaluation a little deeper for the learning clues it contains. RAN? Semantics? Syntax? That kind of thing. Not my specialty; know enough to be a danger.