In 1997, Congress commissioned the National Reading Panel. This panel of experts assessed the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read. The panel selected fluency as one of the five reading areas for review and analysis because there is growing concern that children are not achieving fluency in reading. It has been recognized that fluency is one of the most neglected areas in the reading curriculum. The National Reading Panel Report (2000) noted that often teachers do not recognize that word recognition accuracy is not the end point of reading instruction. Fluency represents a level of expertise beyond word recognition accuracy or the speed at which a person can read orally. A fluent reader is one who can perform multiple tasks, such as word recognition and comprehension at the same time. Some indicators of reading fluency are accuracy and ease in decoding, speed of reading, and expression in oral reading. However, these are mere indicators of fluency. The essential characteristics of fluency are simultaneous decoding and comprehension of the text.
Being a fluent or automatic reader is not a stage of development in which all words can be processed quickly and easily. Even highly skilled readers may encounter uncommon, low frequency words that they cannot recognize automatically. In such situations, the reader encountering unfamiliar, low-frequency words may shift from automatic to a controlled processing mode. At one time, fluency was considered to be a dichotomous variable in which readers were considered to be either “fluent” or “non-fluent”. Today, however, fluency is considered to be a continuum. For example, a reader may be fluent at the third grade instructional level, but non-fluent at the fifth grade instructional level.
Reading fluency requires that two tasks, decoding and comprehension, be accomplished simultaneously. As a result, a proper test of fluency must test both decoding and comprehension simultaneously. One of the primary measures being used today for monitoring student progress is the formative assessment procedure called Curriculum Based Measurement (“CBM”). CBM was originally used to allow teachers to monitor the reading progress of students by measuring the student's reading speed week by week. It requires students to orally read a passage appropriate for their grade level. The number of words read correctly in one minute is recorded. The CBM testing procedure was never intended to be a test of reading fluency, but became the prototype for another test, the DIBELS test.
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (“DIBELS”) is an early age literacy assessment typically used for the kindergarten through sixth grade levels. The DIBELS test is based on the one minute testing procedure used in Curriculum Based Measurement. It uses brief, timed measures to track the progress of a student over time. More specifically, the DIBELS assessment employs a sequence of one-minute measures that test, for example, recognizing initial sounds, naming the letters of the alphabet, segmenting the phonemes in a word, reading nonsense words, oral reading of a passage, retelling, and word use. The DIBELS test can answer the question whether a student is at risk of reading difficulty, but like CBM cannot conclusively establish that a participant is fluent or non-fluent. The DIBELS test has been criticized as a test of fluency since it does not measure comprehension. Students who take the DIBELS test quickly learn that comprehension will not be assessed and that only speed counts. These students may come to think that the important aspect to reading is speed and that comprehension is of little importance.
The Retell Fluency (“RTF”) is intended to provide a comprehension check for the DIBELS test. A student is asked to tell as much as they can in one minute about the text previously read. The combination of the DIBELS test and the RTF test is considered unreliable since decoding and comprehension are not tested simultaneously. Studies have been conducted in which students were given a test of oral reading in which their oral reading speed was recorded. Subsequent to this test, a comprehension test was administered. Although the correlations between these two measures of reading speed and comprehension were significant, the two measures failed to measure simultaneous decoding and comprehension. When students were tested in a manner that required them to decode and comprehend text simultaneously, the correlations between these two measures of reading speed and comprehension were not significant. This may be attributed to the fact that students orally read text and then are immediately tested on comprehension such that students typically read the text orally at a slow pace in order to understand the material. Thus, the DIBELS test as well as the RTF test are invalid measures of fluency.
The Woodcock Johnson Word Recognition test is another reading test in use today. It requires that participants read words in order from easy to difficult. A grade equivalent is assigned based on where the participant begins having difficulty reading from the list of words. Here again comprehension is not part of the measure.
Reading Fluency Indicator (“RFI”) is a better measure of reading fluency. It requires a participant to read a passage from the participant's grade level. The passage is taken away and the participant is asked to answer a four question multiple-choice test. This test comes closer to measuring the main characteristic of fluency, that is, simultaneous decoding and comprehending. However, RFI can not answer the question whether a participant is fluent or not. RFI testing is also fairly time-consuming.
Accordingly, there is a need for a valid system and methods by which reading fluency can be measured accurately and reliably requiring simultaneous decoding and comprehension. The present invention satisfies this demand.