Company Touts System to Match Students and Books

Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/1/1998

Want Johnny to read more? Then give him books that match his reading level. That's the rationale behind the Lexile Framework, a new system that measures students' reading levels and the difficulty of books.

Lexile is the brainchild of a North Carolina company called MetaMetrics, which hopes to convince educators its system will help teach students to read and keep them reading thereafter.

The company has developed a computer program that can evaluate the difficulty of books. These measurements, based on features such as sentence length and how common the words are, are then expressed as numbers, from 200 to 1700 "Lexiles" To get a comparable measure for student reading levels, MetaMetrics can translate standardized test scores into Lexiles, as well.

But not everyone is hailing the new product, which one expert called "a solution in search of a problem." Students are perfectly capable of finding interesting books on their level--just by sampling them, said Stephen Krashen, Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. Krashen thinks the real problem is that many children "simply have little or no access to reading material" because of paltry school library budgets.