About Lexile® Measures for Reading

The Lexile Framework for Reading is the most widely used reading metric in the world. More than 35 million students in all 50 states receive Lexile measures. More than 65 popular reading assessments and programs and 25 state assessments report Lexile measures and the number grows every day.

Students receive Lexile measures through their state assessment and/or their local school’s reading assessment or instructional program. A Lexile reader measure is a measure of a student’s reading ability.

Reading content also receives Lexile text measures, making it easy for educators to personalize learning. A Lexile text measure is a measure of the text complexity for a book or piece of text.

The Lexile® scale ranges from below 0L for beginning readers and beginning-reading text to above 2000L for advanced readers and text.

Other reading level formulas just measure text. It’s like shopping for shoes and only knowing the sizes available. You need to know both the size of the shoe and the size of the foot to have a good fit. When Lexile reader and text measures are used together, we can predict how well a student will likely comprehend the text. A student should look for materials with a reading comprehension “sweet spot” of 100L below to 50L above the student’s reported Lexile measure. Reading materials in this range will provide an ideal level of challenge while still maintaining the student’s comprehension of the text.