Improving Text Complexity Measurement through the Reading Maturity Metric

One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. As a result, proven methodologies that can be used to objectively quantify the complexity of reading texts are needed. This paper describes Pearson’s text complexity measure, the Reading Maturity Metric (RMM), which utilizes a recently developed metric for tracing the growth of the meanings of words and passages, referred to as Word Maturity (WM). The purposes of this paper are to describe how WM has been incorporated into Pearson’s text complexity measure, to present initial comparisons between this new measure of text complexity and traditional readability measures, and to address measurement issues in the development and use of text complexity measurements.