A new and more accurate measure of the reading difficulty of texts has been created. The Pearson Reading Maturity Metric was developed by scientists at Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies group and measures how close individual students’ reading abilities are to what they will need to succeed in college and careers.

Traditional and current readability formulas rely on a few simple, superficial measures. Pearson used intensive computer analyses to identify more fundamental text features that contribute to text complexity and 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.

Digital Journal brought this news to our attention in their article, “Pearson Announces Creation of New Measure of Text Complexity Designed to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills.” It is nice to see semantic technology being used in another genre and purpose.

Melody K. Smith
