Common Core Standards: Text Complexity

What is text complexity?
Text complexity refers to the level of difficulty of the text for students at a particular grade level. Three factors are used to determine text complexity: qualitative measures, quantitative measures, as well as additional considerations related to the reader and the task.

• Qualitative Measures refer to aspects of a text that can only be answered by a student who has read the book. Examples of these types of measures include levels of meaning, clarity and conventions of language, knowledge demands, structure, and visual device complexity.
• Quantitative Measures include sentence length, the number of difficult or unfamiliar words, or sentence length and syllable count to determine the level of complexity.
• Additional Considerations, such as the previous knowledge a reader has on a particular subject and the level of importance of a particular tasks, are also taken into account.

Why are common core standards emphasizing text complexity?
At college and in the work place we are constantly exposed to more and more complex texts we need to comprehend. School curricula have not been following this trend but rather the opposite, it has been on the decline for over the past 50 years. Common core standards have identified this gap and its mission is to increase students' exposure to more complex texts with an emphasis on middle school to high school grade levels. This change should help to ease the transition to college and the workplace to meet the increases in text complexity needed to succeed.

How does Kurzweil 3000 support text complexity?
Active learning and study strategies available with Kurzweil 3000 allow students to be more engaged in the learning process. Students can improve their reading comprehension and retention with tools such as: built in dictionaries, text highlighting, annotations, Bubble Notes, voice notes, bookmarks and extraction of outlines or word lists. With Kurzweil 3000, students can interact with text to increase their comprehension.Teachers can use many of the same tools to provide support and words of encouragement in written or audio notes.

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