Reading Maturity Metric

Pearson's Reading Maturity Metric is a new and more accurate measure of the reading difficulty of texts. Developed by scientists at Pearson's Knowledge Technologies group, the new computer-based technology on average predicts the grade level of a text about 30 percent more accurately than traditional readability formulas.

Traditional and current readability formulas 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. This new measure utilizes a range of measures of the text structure, syntax and vocabulary usage including Word Maturity. Word Maturity is a novel application of Latent Semantic Analysis, a widely used mathematical model of human language. Its application to text complexity, the Reading Maturity Metric, simulates how each of thousands of individual words gradually develop their unique meanings by being encountered in paragraphs entwined with already known words that implicitly define the new words.

Details on the research behind Word Maturity and the Reading Maturity Metric can be found in the following references and the performance of Reading Maturity Metric is detailed in a White Paper and in a soon to be published report by Student Achievement Partners.