How does Quill determine the Grade Level Range for activities?

As part of our curriculum development process, each activity on Quill is assigned a Target Grade Range. In general, these ranges include one of the following:

To determine the Target Grade Range, the Quill curriculum team considers several factors, including:

Quill uses tools like Lexile and others to assess the text complexity, or reading level, of each of our activities. In most cases, the Target Grade Range will include or be higher than the grade indicated by the text complexity.

For example, if the text complexity for an activity is equivalent to 6th-7th grade, then the Target Grade Range might be 6th-8th grade. If another factor from the list above makes it better suited for a different range of students, it would only be higher than its text complexity—not lower.

In our curriculum development processes, we will also adjust the text complexity to make sure it matches the intended Target Grade Range. As students engage with the activity and focus on the target skill, our aim is that the complexity of the text should not become an unintended barrier.

Quill’s curriculum team aligns activities to a variety of state and national ELA standards. As we do so, we pay careful attention to the grade level or grade range of the aligned standards. That grade range factors into our determination of the target grade range.

In addition to the above, we consider the level of rigor required for students completing an activity. Each of Quill’s tools is designed to be able to promote various depths of knowledge and higher-order thinking skills. As an example, a Fill-in-the-Blank activity on subject-verb agreement would require less depth of knowledge or a lower level rigor than a Quill Proofreader activity on that same skill. That’s because in a Fill-in-the-Blank on subject-verb agreement, students are selecting one of two options of verb conjugation. In contrast, in a Proofreader, they would be tasked with reading at least one full paragraph while identifying and correcting all of the errors.

In rare cases, other factors affect whether an activity is appropriate for students of a given grade range, and the Target Grade Range may start at a higher grade than the text complexity and standards. For example, if an activity has a text complexity of 6th-7th grade but addresses a particularly mature or complex subject, the Target Grade Range may be 8th-12th to indicate that the activity is best for older students.

Teachers should consider the Target Grade Range to be the range of students that would be best served from a given activity. It is not, however, fully inclusive of all students who might benefit from the activity. Why not? Because writing skills spiral! We know students benefit from continued instruction and practice on skills they learned and mastered earlier. Frequently, students are still developing skills from earlier grades. Above all, teachers know their students best.

In general, an activity with a Target Grade Range of 6-8 could also be used with high school students as additional practice or a spiraled review.

We recommend that you preview the activity before you assign it. You can use the Target Grade Range alongside the Target Skill, the activity content, and what you know about your students and their unique needs and interest to determine what will work best!

Please feel free to send a message to the Quill team using the green message bubble on the bottom right corner of the screen or email us at support@quill.org.