Career readiness: An analysis of text complexity for occupational reading materials

ABSTRACT

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda encourage educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to focus on preparing students for life after high school. A key emphasis is literacy, as the ability to read and comprehend written language is critical to success in college and careers. Understanding the level of reading comprehension needed for college and careers has important instructional implications. This study examined text complexity levels of various career texts using the Reading Maturity Metric and compared them to expectations in the CCSS. Text samples were selected for jobs from the five job zones in the Occupational Information Network database. Text complexity demands for all careers were generally in the CCSS range of college and career readiness and increased as job zone and required preparation increased. Results could provide specific career-related targets to make the CCSS reading requirements more relevant for students.

KEYWORDS:

• Career readiness
• Common Core State Standards
• literacy instruction
• text complexity

Notes

1 Information is available at http://www.corestandards.org/assets/E0813_Appendix_A_New_Research_on_Text_Complexity.pdf

2 A version of the tool is available at www.readingmaturity.com and can be used freely by educators and others to analyze texts.

3 This was generally true if Flesch-Kincaid were used as the measure of text complexity. The average text complexity for Zones 2–5 was in the college- and career-ready band. For Zone 1, the average text complexity value was 10.04, which was slightly lower than the minimum Flesch-Kincaid college- and career-ready value of 10.34.

4 This was also true if Flesch-Kincaid were used as the measure of text complexity.