The Science Behind Lexile Measures

Lexile researchers keep researching.

The Lexile Framework® for Reading is based on more than 30 years of rigorous research, and we continue to test the framework to advance the ways that Lexile measures work for educators and students.

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

This vision of this future was shared by scientists at The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) who funded our research with a series of grants over the course of a decade. These grants supported research on reading and psychometric theory, which culminated in the creation of our flagship product, the Lexile Framework for Reading.

Today, all of our frameworks, including the Lexile Framework, have been externally validated by hundreds of studies in 25 U.S. states and 24 countries.

We also conduct our own research. More than half of our team is comprised of psychometricians, data scientists and researchers with more than 600 years of combined experience. Our team holds more than 40 doctorate and graduate degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, including Duke University, Princeton University, Stanford University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.