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.

Lexile Framework for Reading
The Lexile Framework for Reading matches students’ reading levels with texts. A student’s Lexile score can be assessed by several different standardized tests and reading programs. Parents, students, and teachers can browse books by Lexile Measure.
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.

Fountas and Pinnell
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).
Many systems used to assess a student’s reading level also have systems for text leveling. These computer programs scan books for high frequency words, the number of words per page, the average length of the sentences, the number of pages, the average difficulty of the words, and more. The variables taken into consideration vary from one leveled reading system to another.
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 include Accelerated Reader, Lexile Levels, NWEA MAP RIT, Fountas and Pinnell, A to Z Reading, Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), Scholastic Guided Reading, mClass, Step Into Reading, BOB Books, age demographics, reading by grade level, and more.
