About the Lexile Oral Reading API

The process and specific API service used to report Lexile oral reading measures for students depend on the needs of our partner’s program. These are broadly grouped into three categories:
  1. Partner has manual, teacher-generated Words Correct per Minute (WCPM) and accuracy scores and wants student Lexile oral reading measures calculated that takes into account the difficulty of the passage read by the student.
    1. Partner sends WCPM and accuracy scores and text of the passages students read
    2. MetaMetrics returns student Lexile oral reading measures and the Lexile oral readability measure of the passages.
  2. Partner has WCPM and accuracy scores from their own automatic speech recognition (ASR) or an ASR provider that is one of the partner ASR providers that MetaMetrics has validated for use with the Lexile Framework for Oral Reading and wants student Lexile oral readability measures calculated that take into account the difficulty of the passage read by the student.
    1. Partner sends WCPM and accuracy scores and text of the passages students read.
    2. MetaMetrics returns student Lexile oral reading measures and the Lexile oral readability measure of the passages.
  3. Partner has student oral reading audio files and wants to send them to MetaMetrics to calculate WCPM and accuracy. MetaMetrics will return the student Lexile oral readability measures that take into account the difficulty of the passage read by the student.
    1. Partner sends student oral reading audio files, and text of the passages students read.
    2. MetaMetrics uses Carnegie Speech ASR to determine student WCPM and accuracy scores. MetaMetrics returns student Lexile oral reading measures and the Lexile oral readability measure of the passages along with a diagnostic profile and personalized qualitative feedback. Diagnostics take into account the complexity and readability of the text.

The calls in the Lexile Oral Reading API can be used to calculate both the Lexile oral readability measure of a passage or piece of text and the Lexile oral reading measure for a student.

To use the API to calculate the Lexile oral readability measure for a passage or piece of text, simply submit a text file using the Get Oral Readability Measures for Texts call.

To get a Lexile oral reading measure for a student, you can use reader/performance/ability by either:
  • Sending audio recordings of students’ read-aloud performances with an accompanying text file.
  • Sending student performance characteristics from one or more performances and a Lexile oral readability measure of the passage read with each performance.

This will calculate and return a Lexile oral reading measure for the student. When you send audio and a text file, the call will also calculate performance characteristics that can include WCPM and accuracy. The audio file must be a .wav or .mp3 file with an audible sample long enough to be measured.

The reader/performance/ability call is intended for single reading performances.

You can use reader/performance/ability/aggregate to get an aggregate Lexile oral reading measure for multiple student performances during a single testing event. To do this you can:
  • Send a list of performanceIDs that you received when submitting individual student performances with the reader/performance/ability call.

This will calculate and return an aggregate Lexile oral reading measure for the group of performances.