Fluency: Part 5: Assessment Strategies

You should formally and informally assess fluency regularly to ensure that your students are making appropriate progress. The most informal assessment is simply listening to students read aloud and making a judgment about their progress in fluency. You should, however, also include more formal measures of fluency. For example, the student's reading rate should be faster than 90 words a minute, the student should be able to read orally with expression, and the student should be able to comprehend what is read while reading orally.
Probably the easiest way to formally assess fluency is to take timed samples of students' reading and to compare their performance (number of words read correctly per minute) with published oral reading fluency norms or standards.

Procedure for calculating words correct per minute:
One-minute reading: Total words read-errors = words correct per minute
1. Select two or three brief passages from a grade- level basal text or other grade-level material (regardless of students' instructional levels).
2. Have individual students read each passage aloud for exactly one minute.
3. Count the total number of words the student read for each passage. Compute the average number of words read per minute.
4. Count the number of errors the student made on each passage. Compute the average number of errors per minute.
5. Subtract the average number of errors read per minute from the average total number of words read per minute. The result is the average number of words correct per minute (WCPM).
6. Repeat the procedure several times during the year. Graphing students' WCPM throughout the year easily captures their reading growth.
7. Compare the results with published norms or standards to determine whether students are making suitable progress in their fluency. For example, according to one published norm, students should be reading approximately 60 words per minute correctly by the end of first grade, 90-100 words per minute correctly by the end of second grade, and approximately 114 words per minute correctly by the end of third grade.

Monitoring your students' progress in reading fluency will help you determine the effectiveness of your instruction and set instructional goals. Also, seeing their fluency growth reflected in the graphs you keep can motivate students.

Other procedures that have been used for measuring fluency include Informal Reading Inventories (IRIs), miscue analysis, and running records. The purpose of these procedures, however, is to identify the kinds of word recognition problems students may have, not to measure fluency. Also, these procedures are quite time-consuming. Simpler measures of speed and accuracy, such as calculating words read correctly per minute, are more appropriate for monitoring fluency.

-from http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/reading_first1fluency.html

Reading A-Z has excellent pages on fluency, including charts of recommended fluency rates and scoring procedures, as well as sample passages.

There are sample reader’s theater scripts too. A subscription to Reading A-Z is only $30 a year and is well worth the price. Reading A-Z is a rich resource of illustrated leveled readers that can be duplicated and bound to be sent home with children for practice. For the fluency section, see http://www.readinga-z.com/fluency/index.html#passages