About the Lexile Framework for Reading
The Lexile Framework for Reading is a scientifically proven approach to reading and text measurement. A Lexile® measure is the numeric representation of a student’s performance or a text’s difficulty, both followed by an “L” (for Lexile measure). The Lexile® scale is a developmental scale ranging from beginning reader measures below 0L to above 1600L for advanced text and abilities.
The Lexile scale is independent. That means that the difficulty of books, articles and other reading materials from any source can be evaluated with Lexile measures. Likewise, multiple reading assessments can report student reading ability in Lexile measures. The Lexile metric removes uncertainty by providing a scientific measure of text difficulty and student reading ability.
How Lexile Measures Benefit Education Departments
With Lexile measures, governments can enhance the value of assessments to stakeholders throughout their nation. When educators can measure reading skills and personalise instruction on a common scale, it provides governments vast amounts of data to analyse the success of programmes, identify areas of need and communicate actionable information to stakeholders and constituents.
Lexile measures:
- Provide an interpretive framework for looking at assessment data.
- Connect national assessments to classroom instruction.
- Help governments meet their instructional improvement goals.
- Help governments across the world understand and measure what is happening in classrooms.
- Engage parents in their children’s education.
- Evaluate student assessment growth from a longitudinal perspective.
Benefits for Educators
For your educators, Lexile measures are much more than numbers. They are powerful, versatile tools that educators use to help their students grow as readers. When they use both Lexile student measures and Lexile text measures, they can differentiate instruction for all students across the curriculum.
For example, educators can:
- Connect students with books that are at the right level to challenge students but not overwhelm them, maximising their reading growth.
- Help students at all levels, whether they’re reluctant, struggling or high-achieving.
- Determine and adjust the readability of testing materials.
- Pre-teach vocabulary.
Ultimately, this enhances the value of national assessments to stakeholders throughout the government and region.
Lexile measures are:
✓ A measure of text difficulty and reader ability
✓ Scientific and objective
✓ Applied to reading material
✓ For students
✓ Complementary to other book levelling systems based on criteria that require qualitative judgements e.g. Book Bands.
Lexile measures are not:
☓ A measure of narrative complexity
☓ A measure of appropriate content
☓ An instructional programme