Backed by Research

At MetaMetrics®, research is in our DNA. We were founded 30 years ago as the result of research. And today, research both external and internal are crucial to our mission. Our initial research studies, which resulted in the creation of our flagship product, the Lexile® Framework for Reading, was funded by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) with a series of grants over the course of a decade.

Today our work remains research based and our bench is deep. More than half of our team is comprised of psychometricians, data scientists and researchers who offer 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.

While we continue to work with education companies, publishers and state departments of education to incorporate Lexile® measures and Quantile® measures into their products and assessments, we also have a dynamic research pipeline. On both the math and reading side, we are working on building personalized learning platforms based upon the principles of deliberate practice and sound psychometric theory. In the math domain, we are examining the postsecondary mathematical demands of college and careers. This information will be used to help students and educators monitor that they are “on track” for success in college and careers.

In addition, the academic research community examines and supports the validity of our metrics. There are hundreds of independent research studies on Lexile and Quantile measures. And we support researchers studying our measures with free access to our databases that provide Lexile measures for nearly 300,000 books; the Lexile® Text Analyzer, a tool used to estimate the text complexity of a piece of text; a database with the reading demands for specific careers; and the Lexile® Growth Planner, a tool to forecast student reading performance; and the Landscape of American School English Project, vocabulary lists for research.