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Dr. Malbert Smith and A. Jackson Stenner, Ph.D. founded MetaMetrics, Inc. with the first of five Small Business Innovation Research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Dating back to its founding in 1984, MetaMetrics has focused on developing new ways of matching students to targeted material in order to foster better educational practices and improve learning. The company’s more than 15 years of research in reading culminated in The Lexile Framework for Reading, a common, developmental scale for measuring reader ability and text difficulty. In 2004, MetaMetrics introduced The Quantile Framework for Mathematics, which measures mathematics achievement and the difficulty of mathematical skills and tasks similar to the way Lexiles measure reading ability and text readability. Today, Drs. Smith and Stenner lead MetaMetrics as Lexiles become the global standard for matching readers to text, and Quantiles gain momentum in measuring student performance in mathematics.Dr. Smith has served on the Computer Advisory Board for Inc. Magazine and the North Carolina Council for Economic Development. In 1997, North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt awarded Dr. Smith the prestigious Order of the Longleaf Pine, the state’s highest civilian honor. He is chairman emeritus of the Duke Children’s Classic and The Teddy Bear Ball for Duke Children’s Hospital. Dr. Smith has served on the boards of The Hill Center in Durham, N.C., the National Alopecia Arecata Foundation and Durham’s Child Guidance Clinic. He is also a member of and presents to various state and national educational research and measurement associations.Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his undergraduate degree in psychology from Duke University. He has published and presented numerous papers in the field of educational assessment and measurement, and has taught graduate seminars at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | 