What do the normative data reported by SRI indicate?
Norms are derived from the administration of a given assessment, in this case SRI, to a large and representative sample of students across several grades. Students are selected to represent as closely as possible the relevant characteristics of the national population of students. The results of this large, grade-by-grade administration (or the accumulation of data that produces a sample large enough to be representative) create grade-specific, rank-ordered distributions of performance. In other words, for each grade, scores are arranged from lowest to highest to determine the percentage of students at each score. The percentile rank associated with each score represents that score’s position in the ranking. Because the sample from which the percentile ranks are derived is large and nationally representative, it can be used to determine how your students compare nationally to students in the same grade. For example, when a student earns a Lexile score at the 35th percentile on SRI, he
