Shakopee Public Schools in Shakopee, Minn., has adopted Lexia Reading® district-wide to support both struggling readers and advanced students district-wide. The program is designed to predict which students are unlikely to meet their year-end benchmarks, and then provide a customized action plan and instructional resources to help each student close the achievement gap. Lexia Reading will now be used as an essential component of reading instruction in all elementary schools, and will be used by older, struggling students in the district’s 6th grade center.
The decision to implement the program district-wide was made after a yearlong pilot implementation and an in-depth review of a number of other widely used reading programs.
“Lexia Reading has proven to be an effective tool for our struggling learners and our teachers,” said Jayne Gibson, director of teaching and learning for Shakopee Public Schools. “The software gives the students personalized instruction; it provides the teachers with specific resources and an understanding of how best to incorporate those resources to drive gains; and for administrators — they get a program that is cost-effective and more importantly, delivers meaningful, concise, data on a class, school and district-wide basis.”
Lexia Reading offers a scalable approach, designed to advance reading skills development for all students pre-K through grade 4, and accelerate learning for at-risk students in grades 4–12. The program includes an embedded assessment feature,Assessment Without Testing®, that gathers student performance data without administering a test. The software automatically provides educators with 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 identifies and prioritizes students for small group or individual instruction, providing teachers and intervention specialists with targeted instructional strategies and structured lesson plans, including the minutes-per-week of software usage each student needs in order to improve performance on grade-level assessments.
Gibson continued, “In addition to Lexia’s effective instructional components, we also get a full compliment of online resources that drive teacher-directed instruction and interaction to a much deeper level. We are thrilled that every elementary student in our district will be working on Lexia.”
