Kentucky Department of Education

 

Text Complexity Resources

Last Updated on Friday, March 02, 2012 at 9:01 AM

On this page are resources to support implementation of the KY Core Academic Standards for ELA and the Literacy in the Science, Social Studies/History and Technical Areas Standards.

Text Complexity WebEx PPT in PDF

Text Complexity WebEx Recording (Download the player to view)

Literacy Link Newsletter on Text Complexity (May 2011 issue)

Text Complexity: Qualitative Measures Rubric for Informational Texts

Text Complexity: Qualitative Measures Rubric for Literary Texts

Reader & Task Considerations: Questions for Professional Reflection

Sample Text Complexity Analysis of To Kill A Mockingbird

Blank Text Complexity Analysis Form

Lexile® information can be found at: http://www.education.ky.gov/KDE/Instructional+Resources/Literacy/Lexile+for+Reading

CCSSO Text Complexity Resources
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) hosted a webinar  to share tools and resources to support teachers and districts on text complexity. The webinar featured Sue Pimentel, a member of the Common Core State Standards English language arts writing committee, as well as representatives from the Kansas and Louisiana Departments of Education.  In addition to the webinar, you will find at this link a study, Measures of Text Complexity by Jessica Nelson, Charles Perfetti, David Liben, and Meredith Liben. The study assessed the capabilities of six text difficulty metrics to predict reference measures of text difficulty. These six metrics were as follows: Lexile (MetaMetrics), ATOS (Renaissance Learning), Degrees of Reading Power: DRP Analyzer (Questar Assessment, Inc.), REAP (Carnegie Mellon University), SourceRater (Educational Testing Service), and the Pearson Reading Maturity Metric (Pearson Knowledge Technologies). Additionally, the study included a seventh metric (Coh-Metrix, University of Memphis) that provides multiple indices of text difficulty.

Text Complexity Planning Resources
The CCSSO English language arts SCASS group has been developing a common version of text complexity materials for use by teachers.  These include:

     Qualitative Measures Rubric - NEW!

     Reader and Task Considerations Questions - NEW!

     Text Complexity Template for planning - NEW!

For more information contact:

Cindy Parker
500 Mero Street, 19th floor CPT
Frankfort, KY 40601
Phone: 502-564-2106 x4528
cindy.parker@education.ky.gov