Unlocking Student Growth with Lexile & Quantile Frameworks
Lexile and Quantile measures support understanding student ability in reading and math. They serve as tools to both accelerate growth and track progress. While Lexile and Quantile measures help you to understand student ability and foster improvement, they will, most importantly, help you monitor progress over time.
The Lexile Framework for Reading uses a unified scale to link student reading ability with text complexity. The framework provides a way to place this ability on one side of the scale and text complexity on the other, creating a measurement scale that connects them. As an educator, you can use Lexile measures to find books with the right level of challenge and vocabulary, supporting the development of your students' literacy skills.
The Quantile Framework for Mathematics provides teachers and parents with a scientific way to measure a student’s ability to learn new math concepts and the difficulty of math skills. Each of these measures are on a single scale so that the skill demand and student ability can be matched for personalizing instruction.
After reading this page, you’ll know more about how to use Lexile and Quantile measures to support growth in reading and math for your students.
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Understanding Lexile & Quantile Measures: A Guide for Educators
The Lexile Framework for Reading measures student ability and the complexity of text on the same scale. This means that students and books and other reading materials have Lexile measures.
How Do My Students Get a Lexile Measure?
Your students get Lexile measures from a classroom or state assessment. We partner with state departments of education and test publishers to create assessments or link to existing assessments to report students’ reading scores as Lexile measures. In addition, several of our partners provide a way to get a Lexile measure for children who are homeschooled.
More than 35 million students in all 50 states receive Lexile measures. Over 65 popular reading assessments and programs and more than 20 state assessments report Lexile measures.
How Does a Book or Text Get a Lexile Measure?
A book, article, or piece of text receives a Lexile text measure when it's analyzed by our algorithm that evaluates text complexity. We partner with over 200 publishers and have measured nearly 300,000 books.
We also work with major periodical database providers like EBSCO, GALE, and ProQuest to measure newspaper, magazine articles, and reference content. These partnerships have resulted in over 100 million articles and websites with Lexile measures.
How Do I Find the Lexile Measure of a Book?
Finding a book’s Lexile measure is simple. Just enter the title, author, or ISBN into the Find a Book Quick Search bar. Once you have the measure, you can search for other books in the same range that match your child's interests.
You can also search by text features using Lexile Codes, which indicate the book’s intended use, such as graphic novels ("GN") or books that are easy to decode for beginning readers. After selecting books, you can create a virtual bookshelf in Find a Book for future reference.
Try it out for yourself!
The Quantile Framework for Mathematics provides teachers with a scientific way to measure a student’s ability to learn new math concepts and the difficulty of math skills. Each of these measures are on a single scale so that the skill demand and student ability can be matched for personalizing instruction for your students.
How Do My Students Get Quantile Measures?
Students receive a Quantile measure from state or classroom assessments. We partner with education departments and test publishers to create or link assessments that report math scores as Quantile measures.
A Quantile measure is a number followed by 'Q,' ranging from below 0Q to above 1400Q, covering skills from kindergarten through high school. By graduation, a student should aim for 1350Q to succeed in college and most careers.
A student's Quantile measure indicates:
- Readiness for specific skills and concepts
- Expected success with upcoming skills
- Growth in mathematics across grade levels
What Are Quantile Skill Measures?
Math skills build upon each other, creating a complex web of concepts. The Quantile Framework for Mathematics defines nearly 500 skills, each with a measure indicating its difficulty. As the skill's difficulty increases, so does its Quantile measure.
The difference between a skill's Quantile measure and a student’s measure shows how challenging it might be. For optimal growth, students should practice math within a range of 50Q above or below their Quantile measure.
How Do I Use Quantile Measures With My Students?
More than a million students across over 20 states receive Quantile measures from an assessment and the number continues to grow as we add more state and test partners who align their assessments with the math measures, Quantile measures not only identify which skills and concepts your students are ready to learn, they also help you personalize instruction and track their progress.
You can search the Math Skills Database using your state standards to find free, targeted resources matched to students by their Quantile measure and specific math content.
How do I Interpret Lexile Measures for Reading?
Whether a student struggles to read or is a voracious reader, the Lexile Framework for Reading helps you personalize learning so they can grow their reading abilities.
Two Measures, One Powerful Tool
A student Lexile measure can range from below 0L for early readers to above 2000L for advanced readers. Readers who score below 0L receive a BR for Beginning Reader. More than 100 million books, articles, and websites have received Lexile text measures. Materials receive Lexile text measures based on factors like their vocabulary and complexity. For example, the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, measures 880L. Using the Lexile reading measure and Lexile text measure together is what makes them different from any other reading score. You can use a student’s Lexile measure to engage them with reading materials that accelerate their skills, or, for advanced readers, find materials that offer more challenge, but are also age appropriate.
Reading Comprehension “Sweet Spot”
Students and parents should look for reading materials with a reading comprehension “sweet spot” of 100L below to 50L above their reported Lexile measure. Reading materials in this range will provide students with an ideal level of challenge while maintaining comprehension.
Are There Lexile Measures and Grade Levels for Spanish Texts?
El Sistema Lexile® Para Leer, the reading framework for Spanish, is just like the Lexile Framework for Reading. You can use students’ Spanish Lexile reading measures to match them with appropriately challenging texts with Spanish Lexile measures. Also, Spanish Lexile measures help monitor student progress in reading over time. You can use the Find a Book tool to search for books in Spanish for your students just like for books in English.
Comparing Lexile & Quantile Measures with Grade Levels
Grade-level benchmarks help gauge what students should achieve in reading and math at each grade level, though they can vary by state and product. To provide a clearer picture, we've compiled nationwide datasets to create grade-level charts that align with Lexile measures for reading and Quantile measures for math.
Lexile Grade Level Charts
Lexile measures evaluate a student's individual reading ability rather than directly mapping to a specific grade level. While some states and instructional products provide grade-level benchmarks using Lexile scales, these can differ across regions.
To address this, we’ve developed Lexile Grade Level Charts based on our nationwide dataset, offering a way to see how a student's reading ability compares to their peers in the same grade across the country. These charts are available on the Hub for your reference.
Quantile Grade Level Charts
In math, "grade level" typically refers to the specific skills and operations a student is expected to master by a certain grade. Quantile measures assess a student's individual math skills, but like Lexile measures, they don’t always directly correspond to a specific grade level.
To provide clarity, we’ve created Quantile Grade Level Charts using data from various states and products. These charts allow you to compare a student’s math abilities with those of their peers nationwide, helping you understand their proficiency relative to grade-level expectations.
Unlocking Student Growth with Lexile & Quantile Frameworks
We’ve created two tools to help you use Lexile and Quantile measures to track student progress toward college and career readiness: the Lexile & Quantile Growth Planners and the Lexile & Quantile Career Databases. Learn more on how to support students towards college and career readiness.
Supporting Beginning Readers with Lexile Measures and the Science of Reading
Early Reading
For texts with Lexile measures of 650L or below, early-reading indicators are used to evaluate key features that affect a text's challenge level. These indicators include:
- Structure: organization and layout of the text.
- Syntactic: sentence structure and complexity.
- Semantics: meaning and context of words.
- Decoding: ease of recognizing and sounding out words.
For example, a text with low decoding demands and a low decoding early-reading indicator (e.g., many easy-to-decode words) can be chosen for students ready to practice reading independently.
These indicators also ensure that readers encounter a variety of text types. To find suitable books, use the Find a Decodable Book tool.
Alignment with the Science of Reading
Our tools and resources reflect a commitment to the science of reading, grounded in extensive research and evidence-based practices.
Key resources include:
- Lexile Find a Decodable Book: Helps educators find books based on phonetic patterns like short and long vowel sounds. You can search by long and short vowel sounds – a, e, i, o, u.
- Lexile Decodable Passages: Features more than 100 engaging decodable passages, created in collaboration with published decodable authors. Decodable passages can be searched by vowel patterns, such as digraphs.
These resources support teachers in effectively breaking the alphabetic code and developing proficient readers. Learn more about how Lexile measures align with the science of reading.