Lexia PowerUp Review: One Year Later

Lexia PowerUp is a powerful reading intervention program for 6-8th grade readers. Its core feature is an online platform that provides individual literacy instruction to students and supports teachers through detailed classroom data and insights.

During the 2022-2023 school year, our school district switched to PowerUp from another similar program, and we had the opportunity to implement it in a 7th grade reading intervention classroom. Every student, regardless of their literacy level, was required to participate in the class, and it was particularly effective for our group of young learners. Our charter school is part of a recovery district, and many children read far below their grade level. For this reason, trying the program for the first time was exciting, and we have a few thoughts you will undoubtedly find interesting.

How it Works

When students log into Lexia PowerUp for the first time, they take an assessment to determine their skill levels under three literacy strands: Word Study, Grammar, and Reading Comprehension. After the evaluation, the program assigns instruction and practice modules to students based on their specific learning needs. For example, if a student’s assessment scores show their Grammar ability is at a 3rd grade level, the interactive videos and games Lexia provides for them will cover 3rd grade grammar skills. As students demonstrate mastery of skills, they will progress through the levels of each literacy strand and eventually complete the program.

The Pros and Cons of Lexia PowerUp

Features we liked

We used Lexia PowerUp for an entire school year and loved these standout features:

• Lexia’s data tools are highly insightful and comprehensive. Teachers can easily track how students are performing, which specific skills/concepts students are struggling with, and a variety of other key metrics. Students get their own data page which shows relevant statistics including their time spent in Lexia, number of units completed, streak scores, and their overall progress in the program. It’s even possible to compare data between classes, teachers, and grade levels through the administrator dashboard, and this wealth of information proved extremely helpful throughout the year, helping us modify our instructional methods as needed.
• The program’s design keeps students engaged and motivated. Upon logging in, students are greeted with an inviting color palette and user interface that is simple to navigate. A mix of fun videos, games, and reading passages help draw students in and keep them interested as they learn. Features like the streak counter and congratulations messages reward students for performance, and teachers can use them as reference points for their own classroom token economies. Though repetitive at times, the repetition is conducive to learning, because sometimes that’s exactly what students need.
• The PowerUp Resource Hub provides exceptional supplemental content for educators. Teachers can download lesson plans, worksheets, certificates, and other materials to enrich their literacy classrooms and support students in numerous ways. Some resources even come in both printable and digital form, allowing you the option to print out paper handouts or assign their online equivalents for students to work through.

Areas that need improvement

Despite all its positives, Lexia PowerUp has a few weak points, and here are few we noticed:

• The platform times out and crashes randomly. Students often reported being unable to click or type during lessons, and upon refreshing their browser pages, they would have to log back in. This happened daily, affecting students at random and forcing them to start lessons over from the beginning. For improved classroom management, we made sure to keep a procedure on the wall reminding students to refresh their browsers or restart their computers when they encountered this issue. Either way, we’d like to see more stability from PowerUp in the future.
• Lexia servers are periodically shut down for maintenance. Unlike the issue mentioned above, this happened on rare occasions. The platform would crash, and students would receive an error message when trying to log back in. Sometimes they would taken to a page indicating the maintenance was taking place. Fortunately, we had MobyMax as an alternative when PowerUp was unavailable. A notification system alerting teachers and students to impending downtime would have prevented us from being caught by surprise.
• The program has a few glitches. One of the main exploits students used was a trick to roll back their answer streak when they lost it due to an incorrect answer. For example, let’s say a student begins a new lesson with their streak already at 200. During the lesson, they increase their streak to 250 but get an answer wrong and watch their streak reset to zero. In this case, students can immediately back out of the lesson and regain the streak they had before the lesson started. Instead of zero, their streak would return to 200. This can be problematic if you rewards students for streaks, and in our case, we monitored them closely and stopped them from backing out of lessons when we saw them trying to manipulate the system.

Final words

Overall, Lexia PowerUp is a superb instrument for middle school reading intervention. It creates a solid foundation for literacy programs and works as a supplemental tool to help students achieve grade level mastery. The program isn’t perfect, but with intuition and expertise, teachers can fill in the gaps where PowerUp is lacking. It’s user-friendly enough for beginners to catch on quickly, and experts will have a field day tinkering with its versatile components. With plenty of lessons, data, and resources to explore in the educator dashboard, every instructors will find something they can appreciate.

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