ABSTRACT
This chapter provides information about the Coh-Metrix Common Core Text Ease and Readability Assessor (TERA1), a freely available automated text analysis tool that calculates information about text difficulty at multiple levels of the text. TERA provides a profile of text difficulty encompassing five dimensions: narrativity, syntax, word concreteness, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion. TERA was developed primarily for teachers. It is specifically focused on the analysis of texts assigned to students in kindergarten through early college classes. The ability to comprehend texts is a critical skill for success in both school environments and in the workplace. As text becomes a more common medium for communication, the importance of developing strong literacy skills has subsequently increased. TERA was designed to help improve literacy skills by providing educators with the resources necessary to match student skills with appropriate texts. Many years of previous research on reading and text comprehension have been leveraged to develop the TERA dimensions.
