Grolier Online Offers Lexile® Measures for More Than 115,000 Articles
Reading Measure Allows Teachers to Match Students With Content to Support Learning Across the Curriculum
DURHAM, N.C., & NEW YORK — Sept. 6, 2006 — MetaMetrics® Inc., developer of The Lexile Framework® for Reading, and Scholastic Library Publishing, a division of Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced that more than 115,000 articles in Grolier Online®, the premier online portal for safe, authoritative student research information, now have Lexile® measures. As the most widely adopted reading measure in use today, the Lexile Framework provides a common scale for matching reader ability and text difficulty, allowing easy monitoring of student progress and ensuring reading comprehension.
“Scholastic was one of the first education companies to adopt Lexiles, which makes it particularly exciting for Grolier Online to reach this significant milestone in providing Lexile measures for its materials,” said Malbert Smith III, Ph.D., president, MetaMetrics. “By using Lexiles to match students to articles in Grolier Online, teachers can ensure that students are reading and comprehending content across the curriculum-no matter what their Lexile level might be.”
Grolier Online is an educational portal providing access to eight online databases, including “The New Book of Knowledge,” “Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia®,” “Encyclopedia Americana®,” the Spanish-language “La Nueva Enciclopedia CumbreTM,” and the newly launched “Amazing Animals of the World,” which contains articles, pictures and multimedia content on over 1,200 animals. The portal’s integrated database collection and search utility provide two age-appropriate learning environments, “Grolier Online Kids” (for young students in grades 2-8) and “Grolier Online Passport” (for grades 9-12), to simplify fact-finding for beginners and advanced users.
“With the addition of Lexiles, Grolier Online becomes an even more powerful resource for educators, as media specialists and teachers can match students with rich non-fiction content written at their appropriate reading level. The result is not just students who are better researchers, but better readers as well,” said Duncan Young, acting general manager, Grolier Online.
Winner of the 2006 Notable Online Subscription Service Award from the Association for Library Service to Children and the Association of Educational Publishers’ Ed Press Distinguished Achievement Award, Grolier Online combines the best of a legacy of critically acclaimed, age-appropriate print sets with a wealth of additional resources available only in the online format in one powerful educational portal for students, teachers, librarians and patrons-anyone with an information need.
For more information about Grolier Online, visit Scholastic Library Publishing at go.grolier.com.
Recognized as the most accurate way to match readers with text, there are currently Lexile measures for more than 100,000 books, 80 million articles and 60,000 Web sites. More than 20 million students received a Lexile measure during the 2005-2006 school year.
About Scholastic Library Publishing
Scholastic Library Publishing creates a multitude of products, both in print and online, for the school and public library market under the imprints of Grolier, Children’s Press®, Franklin Watts® and Grolier Online®. Children’s Press offers primarily non-fiction series for elementary and middle schools, while Franklin Watts focuses on non-fiction for the high school market. Grolier publishes encyclopedias and is best known for the brands “Encyclopedia Americana” and “The New Book of Knowledge.” Grolier Online is a self-contained, non-commercial electronic gateway offering thousands of resources for student research, including the “Encyclopedia Americana Online,” “The New Book of Knowledge Online” and the Spanish language encyclopedia “La Nueva Enciclopedia Cumbre”-serving more than 18 million students and teachers.
About Scholastic
Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ: SCHL) is the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a leader in educational technology. Scholastic creates quality educational and entertaining materials and products for use in school and at home, including children’s books, magazines, technology-based products, teacher materials, television programming, film, videos and toys. The company distributes its products and services through a variety of channels, including proprietary school-based book clubs, school-based book fairs, and school-based and direct-to-home continuity programs; retail stores, schools, libraries and television networks; and the company’s Internet site, www.scholastic.com.
About The Lexile Framework for Reading/The Quantile Framework for Mathematics
MetaMetrics Inc. developed The Lexile Framework for Reading and its companion scale, The Quantile Framework® for Mathematics. The Lexile Framework (www.Lexile.com) provides a common scale for matching reader ability and text difficulty, enabling teachers and parents to choose materials that can help to improve student reading skills and monitor literacy across the curriculum and at home. Recognized as the most widely adopted reading measure in use today, Lexiles are part of reading and testing programs at the district, state and federal levels. More than 100,000 books, 80 million articles and 60,000 Web sites have Lexile measures, and all major standardized tests can report student reading scores in Lexiles. Launched in 2004, Quantiles® (www.Quantiles.com) measure student mathematical achievement and concept/application solvability similar to the way Lexiles measure reading proficiency. The Quantile Framework represents a student’s ability to think mathematically in a taxonomy of math skills, concepts and applications. The Quantile strands-Geometry; Measurement; Numbers and Operations; Algebra/Patterns & Functions; and Data Analysis & Probability-integrate and align with the strands described by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).