One of the strengths of PASeries Reading is in its use of Lexile measures as PASeries' scoring scale.
Lexiles, for the uninitiated, are a standard measure of reading ability and text difficulty. The Lexile measures in PASeries Reading provide the reading ability part of the measurement.
The real power of using that PASeries Reading Lexile score comes when an educator, parent or even the student can use the score to match reading ability with a book or article in everyday life. If a reader's Lexile measure is matched with the Lexile measure of a text (say, 800 to 800), that reader is expected to comprehend about 75 percent of the written material -- tough enough to be challenging, but not so difficult as to be frustrating.
So how does one go about using the Lexile measures generated by PASeries Reading?
An easy way is to visit the Lexile.com Web site and the free
Lexile Book Database. Some 100,000 books have Lexile measures, and on the Lexile site you can plug in a Lexile score and get a list of books in approximately the same range. It's a nice, free tool, provided by MetaMetrics, the developers of the Lexile Framework for Reading.