Educators and parents now have access to student measures to support classroom teaching and learning at home.
DURHAM, N.C. and SANTA FE, N.M. – January 9, 2024 – MetaMetrics, Inc., and the New Mexico Public Education Department announce collaboration to report Lexile® and Quantile® measures, providing new tools for using assessment results to inform teaching, learning and career planning. Over 300,000 additional students will now receive MetaMetrics’ measures from the New Mexico Measure of Student Success and Achievement (NM-MSSA) annual summative assessment and i-MSSA interim assessments, joining over 35 million students in the U.S. who already receive the well-known measures through summative and interim testing.
The Lexile and Quantile Frameworks place both the student and instructional material on the same scale to match the learner with reading and math resources at each student’s ability level. When students receive Lexile and Quantile measures from a state assessment, their test scores become more actionable, providing teachers with information about student learning so they can tailor instruction. The forthcoming update to the New Mexico Mathematics Instructional Scope includes Quantile Framework for Mathematics resources to support curricular use of the measures. In addition, parents can support learning at home by using Lexile and Quantile measures to find books and math activities that encourage students to grow without causing frustration.
“Access to Lexile and Quantile measures are an important resource for building reading and math abilities,” said Malbert Smith, CEO and co-founder, MetaMetrics. “Our measures provide New Mexico families and educators with tools to pair students with reading and mathematics materials that are at just the right challenge level to support growth.”
New Mexico students in grades 3-8 began receiving Lexile and Quantile measures linked to the NM-MSSA 2023 spring administration. The New Mexico Public Education Department partners with assessment service provider Cognia to administer NM-MSSA summative and i-MSSA interim assessments. Through Pathways2Careers New Mexico, students in grades 8-12 can take beginning, middle and end-of-year assessments and use their Quantile measures to explore and evaluate possible careers, increase awareness of in-demand jobs and understand their readiness for specific fields.
“For the first time, our teachers have access to a true growth scale that allows them to assess and monitor student learning,” explained Lynn Vásquez, New Mexico Public Education Department Division Director of Assessment, Research, Evaluation and Accountability. “Lexile and Quantile measures provide data that students, families, and educators can use to guide learning and, for older students, career pathways.”
In addition to Lexile and Quantile measures, educators in New Mexico now have Premium membership access to the Lexile® & Quantile® Hub. The Hub is an online platform that provides teachers with tools for using the measures with their students, including instructional and planning resources, including a career database, book search, text analyzer, academic word lists, math skills database and more. A robust set of professional development materials is available to support educators in learning how to use Lexile and Quantile measures in the classroom, communicate effectively with parents and peers and improve student learning.
About the New Mexico Public Education Department
The New Mexico Public Education Department partners with educators, communities, and families to ensure that ALL students are healthy, secure in their identity, and holistically prepared for college, career, and life. Our mission is to ensure students in New Mexico are engaged in a culturally and linguistically responsive educational system that meets the social, emotional, and academic needs of ALL students. The New Mexico Public Education Department believes in the strength of our state’s diverse communities and in the inherent value of our multilingualism, resilience, creativity, culture, and compassion for one another. For more information, visit www.nm.gov/departments-and-agencies/public-education-department/.
About MetaMetrics
MetaMetrics Brings Meaning to Measurement
MetaMetrics is guided by a powerful north star—to support student growth through actionable learning measurement. Over the last 35+ years, MetaMetrics’ staff of educators, psychometricians and policy leaders have developed learning frameworks that now support over 35 million students in the US. More than half of the K-12 students in the US receive Lexile and Quantile measures and over a hundred million pieces of content have corresponding measures. MetaMetrics was founded in 1984 by Dr. A. Jackson Stenner (retired) and Dr. Malbert Smith with the singular goal of making measurement meaningful by matching students to learning resources using a scientific, universal scale. Today, Lexile and Quantile measures are available in all 50 states, either through formal partnership agreements with 21 state departments of education or at the local level through partnerships with edtech companies who deliver services to schools and districts. Leveraging the most advanced AI technology and learning theory, MetaMetrics continues to innovate solutions for a wide range of applications including early reading, career readiness and tutoring. For more information, visit MetaMetricsInc.com.