Refinement Stage

In the refinement stage, young adults begin to take interest in topics far removed from themselves. They enjoy reading fantasy and science fiction, writing poetry or short stories, and studying specific subjects. Their sentence constructions are more complex, and as writers, youths develop their own style. After proper instruction, they can revise their writing by adding, deleting, and rearranging sentences and paragraphs. Most youths reach this stage by sixth grade and exit it by ninth grade.

During my refinement stage, schools began to utilize computers more for science and math classes, and as a result, I rarely used a computer for reading and writing. My interests during this stage lay in social studies, music, and literature. I even joined the Accelerated Reader Program. In this program, certain books were assigned a point value. After reading a qualifying book, a student would take a computerized test to evaluate how well he or she understood the reading and was awarded all or a portion of the book’s assigned point value. By the end of the school year, the students in the program had accumulated points, and those students with the highest points were given an award.

Unfortunately, my freshman year of high school was completely disrupted. Broken between three high schools, this final year of the refinement stage left me without a strong foundation to continue into the Advanced Literacy stage.