Education services provider Pearson, US, has announced the creation of the Pearson Reading Maturity Metric, projected as an accurate measure of the reading difficulty of texts. Developed by scientists at Pearson's Knowledge Technologies group, the new computer-based technology measures how close an individual student's reading abilities are to what they will need to succeed in college and careers.
The technology is seen to support Pearson's commitment to overcome the low reading abilities of the hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children who enter school with woefully low vocabularies that foretell lifelong educational failure. The new measure of text difficulty seeks to identify and help to fill the relatively small gap in reading ability of preschool age children before it is too late.
Traditional and current readability formulas reportedly rely on only a few, simple superficial measures, such as the average number of words in sentences and how frequently words are encountered in general or educational reading. Scientists at Pearson used intensive computer analyses to identify more fundamental text features that contribute to text complexity. Also, Pearson developed an artificial intelligence technology that estimates how much reading of various kinds and in what order a person must have accomplished to understand a particular text.
The development of this new text complexity measure is detailed in a white paper, "Pearson's Text Complexity Measure," available at http://www.pearsonassessments.com/nextgeneration.
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