Providing students with tools to support them as they plan for college and careers is important to help them stay on track in school and plan for their futures. We created tools, the Lexile & Quantile Career Planners and the Lexile & Quantile Career Databases, to help teachers, parents, and students leverage our measures for college and career planning. Ranges for grades 1 through 12 are based on the text complexity grade bands in the Common Core State Standards for English, Language Arts.

*When a Lexile measure is below 0L, a BR (Beginning Reader) code is reported with the measure.

The Lexile & Quantile Growth Planners were designed to help students monitor their growth towards the reading and math requirements for the career they would like to pursue. The Growth Planners provide insights early in a student’s educational journey, allowing educators and parents to effectively guide and direct their progress.

With the Lexile & Quantile Growth Planners, you can see the Lexile level and/or Quantile level associated with entry-level reading and/or math demands of hundreds of careers to inform goal setting and then are directed to resources to help students improve their reading and math skills to prepare for those careers.

To create the Lexile & Quantile Growth Planners, we studied the text demands of typical reading material for students in grades 1 through 12. The “stretch” text measures (defined in 2012 through studies related to the development of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts) represent the reading demand of texts that would advance to 1300L, a text level that individuals typically encounter in their initial postsecondary college and career experiences.

How do the Lexile & Quantile Growth Planners work?

Using past Lexile and Quantile measures from statewide tests, the Growth Planners:

• Forecast student growth
• Check if they’re on track for college and career readiness
• Compare their progress with peers nationwide
• Suggest paths for accelerating progress if needed

The Lexile & Quantile Career Databases are tools for identifying the reading and math abilities necessary for career preparedness. They contain Lexile and Quantile measures for more than 600 careers (to date) as well as important descriptive information, such as median pay, projected career growth, and education level required for each career. The databases are the result of years of research examining the text complexity of a variety of reading materials in various domains of the post-secondary experience.

The Lexile & Quantile Career Databases use common scales for readiness across all careers and are excellent resources to help prepare students for successful futures. With the Career Databases, educators and parents can identify the reading and math abilities needed for a desired career and use this information to inform goal setting. They provide the only metric available to compare and describe the reading and math demands of careers.

The careers featured within the Lexile & Quantile Career Databases include Bright Outlook Occupations by O*NET, the premier online career search database designed for the U.S. Department of Labor. Bright Outlook Occupations are careers that are expected to grow and/or emerge in the next few years and offer large numbers of new job openings.

The Lexile & Quantile Career Databases are based on data from:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a unit of the U.S. Department of Labor, is the principal fact-finding agency for the government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System.

• Occupational Information Network (O*NET), the nation's primary source of occupational information and is developed under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA).

• Projections Managing Partnership (PMP), an integrated, nationwide program of state and local labor market projections. The PMP helps projections customers make informed decisions based on the most reliable and relevant occupational and industry outlook information. Funding for the PMP is provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration, with technical support from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other entities across the country.

Want To Learn More?

The Lexile Framework for Reading measures the complexity of postsecondary texts to provide a target range for college and career readiness, highlighting the essential reading skills needed for advanced work and study. For more details, see:

• MetaMetrics. (n.d.). Lexile Framework for Reading quantifies reading ability needed for college and career readiness. MetaMetrics Inc.