TEXT COMPLEXITY

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One of the key requirements of the Common Core Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school.  But how do we determine text complexity?  This video gives a pretty clear explanation of the Common Core Standards' approach to text complexity:

And the complexity levels are going up!

We all know how to determine a text's quantitative complexity (Lexile, Flesch-Kincaid, Frye Readability Index, etc.), but how do we determine the qualitative complexity of a piece of text?  Obviously this is going to be subjective; however, just like in assessing writing, we can develop a local rubric that is consistently applied throughout the district.

Here are a couple samples of rubrics from the Kentucky Department of Education:

Qualitative Measures Rubric for Informational Texts

Qualitative Measures Rubric for Literatry Texts

Here is a sample analysis:
Sample Text Complexity Analysis for To Kill a Mockingbird

Your turn!  Please select a piece of text (literary or informational) that you have used in your classroom and complete a text complexity analysis using this form:

Blank Text Complexity Analysis Form