Benefits for State DoEs
Lexile® Measures as a Communication Tool & More
When educators can measure reading skills and personalize instruction on a common scale, it provides state departments of education vast amounts of data to analyze the success of programs and communicate to stakeholders and constituents.
Lexile measures:
- Provide an interpretive framework for looking at assessment data.
- Connect state assessment results to classroom instruction.
- Help state departments of education meet their instructional improvement goals.
- Engage parents in their children’s education.
- Evaluate student assessment growth from a longitudinal perspective.
Benefits for Educators
More than 35 million Lexile measures are reported from state assessments, classroom assessments and reading instructional programs, representing about half of U.S. students.
For 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 reader measures and Lexile text measures, they can differentiate instruction for all readers across the curriculum.
For example, educators can:
- Connect students with books that are at the right level to challenge students but not overwhelm them, maximizing their reading growth.
- Help readers at all levels, whether they’re reluctant, struggling or high-achieving.
- Determine and adjust the readability of testing materials.
- Pre-teach vocabulary.
Benefits for Parents & Students
Our state department of education partners often like to communicate with parents about how they can use the Lexile® Framework for Reading at home with their children. Using Lexile measures at home helps foster a reading culture and improve literacy skills.
What to Tell Parents
- Let parents know where they can find their child’s Lexile measure. All major standardized reading tests and several popular instructional reading programs report student scores as Lexile measures. Some schools include Lexile measures with report cards, assessment results and home reading materials. And, of course, your state assessment if it reports Lexile reader measures.
- Communicate how Lexile measures are an improvement over grade-level measurements. It doesn’t matter if a child is reading at a “5th-grade” level. What matters is the reading level of individual 5th graders, and whether they’re getting the right materials for their unique level and are progressing over time.
- Educate parents on how they can help manage their child’s reading skills by matching them to appropriately challenging text. By using the Lexile reading measure to match to materials that have a Lexile text measure, parents are making sure their children are reading content that’s not too difficult to be frustrating, but hard enough to challenge them and help them progress.
- Direct parents to free resources where they can find the tens of thousands of books and millions of articles with Lexile measures. This includes the popular Find a Book tool.