Are 11th Graders Prepared for College-Level Reading?

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Current rates of enrollment in remedial college courses indicate that many graduating high school students are unprepared for college-level work or the workforce. REL Southwest’s study, How Prepared are Students for College-Level Reading? Applying a Lexile®-Based Approach, develops a methodology that can be applied in a real-world context and provides policymakers and educators with information to help them evaluate and understand the effectiveness of efforts to prepare students for postsecondary success.

This study develops and documents this new methodology that determines what proportion of 11th graders in Texas public schools are prepared to read college textbooks. The methodology utilizes the Lexile Framework® for Reading. This framework measures the reading difficulty of prose texts and the reading capacity of students. The Lexile measure uses sentence length and word frequency to assign reading difficulty values to passages of text.

This study links student scores on an exit-level Texas English language arts and reading assessment with college English textbooks to gauge students’ ability to read and comprehend textbooks used in entry-level English courses in the University of Texas system. The students’ reading comprehension test scores are used to determine a specific Lexile, which is a measure of the text the student is likely to read at a 75 percent comprehension level.

The findings for Texas show that:

• About half of students can read 95 percent of first-year English textbooks used in entry-level classes in the University of Texas system.
• Some 80 percent can read 50 percent of all English textbooks.
• About 9 percent can read no more than 5 percent of all English textbooks.