Research & Publications

MetaMetrics® was born from research.

Our founders, A. Jackson Stenner, Ph.D., and Dr. Malbert Smith, Ph. D., had a vision to make test scores more actionable by blurring the distinction between assessment and instruction.

Leaders at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) wanted to support our founders in their mission and funded MetaMetrics’ research with a series of grants over the course of a decade. Their research culminated in MetaMetrics’ flagship product, the Lexile® Framework for Reading.

That spirit of curiosity and research lives on today. More than half of MetaMetrics’ team is comprised of psychometricians, data scientists and researchers who offer more than 600 years of combined experience. In the last 30 years, all of MetaMetrics’ frameworks, including the Lexile scale, have been externally validated by more than 1,000 studies in 25 U.S. states and 24 countries. As we continue to partner with the education community, we’ll keep advancing the effectiveness of Lexile® measures and all of our services.