Literacy Levels
About Leveled Systems
Reading Level Conversion Chart
About Reading Leveled Systems
Schools often use various reading level systems to assess and track their students’ reading comprehension skills. Each reading level system uses a different algorithm to analyze the text within a book. Levels are assigned to books, and students assessments are used to determine which “level” is most suitable for that child at the given moment. Lexile measures, for example, analyze semantic difficulty (word frequency or repetition) and syntactic complexity whereas Accelerated Reader assesses books based on page count, number of syllables per word, and average words per sentence. Guided Reading Levels analyzes word count, semantic difficulty, sentence length, and sentence complexity. While these systems may seem somewhat similar, the weight each places on different data points varies and, as such, books are ‘leveled’ quite differently. One might assume that book might at least appear in the same order from one metric to another, but this is not the always the case.
Numerically Based Literacy Levels

Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA)
The DRA assessment measures skills in nine categories of reading behavior and six types of errors.

Rausch Unit (RIT)
RIT scores are provided by the NWEA MAP Test. The NWEA MAP test is an adaptive assessment. As such, the MAP test provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate reading comprehension skills below, at, or above grade level.

Rausch Unit (RIT)
Alphabetically Based Literacy Levels

Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA)
The DRA assessment measures skills in nine categories of reading behavior and six types of errors.

Rausch Unit (RIT)
RIT scores are provided by the NWEA MAP Test. The NWEA MAP test is an adaptive assessment. As such, the MAP test provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate reading comprehension skills below, at, or above grade level.

Rausch Unit (RIT)
Conversion Chart
Different lettered and numbered systems are used to distinguish levels of literacy among school-aged children. To make matters more confusing, the same letter or number may not mean the same thing from one system to another. Moreover, assessment tools vary from one system to another. While one system may measure complexity based on word frequency and sentence strength, another might emphasize a child’s ability to read a text aloud(reading fluency).
Over a dozen reading level systems are used across our country including grade equivalents, age equivalents, accelerated reader, Rausch Scale (RIT or MAP), Lexile, Fountas and Pinnell, DRA, A-Z Reading Levels, and Scholastic Guided Reading. Of these, three use an alphabetized system (Fountas and Pinnell, A-Z, and Scholastic). NWEA MAP produces RIT scores which range from 100 to 300 (although the 99th percentile for 11th grade is 263). Lexile scores range from 100L (Kindergarten) to 2000L even though 1800 is the highest possible score that MetaMetrics lets you search for, and 1033L is considered College and Career Ready.
The chart below correlates a dozen different reading level systems.
