Teacher question:
I just read your piece on how you would schedule reading instruction, and while it was helpful, I'd love to hear more about what that looks like at the middle school level. Specifically, how much do you think it is the middle school English teacher’s responsibility to cover fluency. I recently attended a Science of Comprehension Symposium and Doug Lemov shared fantastic, practical videos of secondary teachers doing wonderful whole group fluency work. How much time should be devoted to fluency (we have an 80-minute ELA block)?
Shanahan response:
Great question. I’m pleased to have secondary school teachers asking, “what do we do with fluency?” instead of the traditional rejection of the idea at those grade levels. Secondary grade teachers have rarely embraced the idea of teaching fluency.
There are many reasons for this rejection. First, it seems so elementary and fundamental. Secondary teachers want to focus on using reading to explore literature, social studies, science, not on developing basic reading skills.
Second, many have experienced fluency pushback from their students. I’m often told that teens and tweens balk at public oral reading. “They just won’t do it,” they tell me, and I believe them. Often these teachers sympathize with the kids, due to their own bad memories of such reading.
Third, the idea that oral reading practice somehow improves silent reading ability seems dubious to many teachers, despite direct evidence that it does just that (Dickens & Meisinger, 2016).
Fourth, many of these teachers have no idea of how to teach fluency. Most view it as some form of round robin reading, which they have usually been criticized for in the past. You can’t please everyone.
There are many excuses for not teaching fluency.
Consequently, this topic will be dealt with in two parts. The first will explain why fluency instruction is essential in middle school and high school. The follow up piece will explore what fluency instruction should look like and where it fits in a secondary school curriculum.
So, the first issue to address is to whether fluency instruction even makes sense in middle and high school.
Oral reading fluency and reading comprehension are closely correlated and kids make gains in fluency each school year. But let’s drill down a bit into those statistics.
Looking at the fluency of primary grade kids, we see that it is a fast-developing skill, with little learning regression, and with high correlations with reading comprehension. Fluency norms (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006, 2017) reveal that kids average annual gains of about 36 words correct per minute (WCPM) each year. The average first grader starts at about 29wcpm and ends with 60wcpm. In grade 2, that average child progresses from 50-100wcpm, while the third graders go from 83 to 112wcpm.
Since most kids get 36 weeks of schooling, that means on average over those first three years students gain about 1 word per week in fluency. That understates the growth rate, since the first- grade norms don’t begin until mid-year; their 31-word gain happens over 18 weeks, not 36.
It’s also informative to consider summer regression during the primary grades. At the end of Grade 1, average students end the year with 60wcpm, but are somewhat lower, 50wcpm, when they return in the fall; a 10 word drop. Similar regression is apparent in grades 2 and 3 – with drops of 17 and 18 words respectively. Kids retain 60% of their annual progress and appear to recover these losses quickly.
In these early years, oral reading fluency is clearly implicated in reading comprehension with correlations about .70. If we could get all students up to the highest levels of fluency, we’d reduce the reading comprehension variation by about 50%, which would be sizeable improvement.
Teaching fluency in the primary grades is a no-brainer. Kids grow quickly in fluency, they tend to maintain those gains, and their reading comprehension depends heavily on how fluently they can read. Not surprisingly, experimental studies show that elementary fluency instruction improves reading achievement for both normally progressing and struggling readers (NICHD, 2000; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003).
The statistics look somewhat different by middle school. The average annual gains in fluency in Grades 6-8 are only 17wcpm, less than 50% the growth of the primary kids. The regression numbers are disheartening, too. Middle school students are less likely to maintain their gains over the summer. The average fluency regression is about 12wcpm during these years. The young’uns regressed about 40% each year, while the teens and tweens lost about 67% of their gains. Slower growth and greater reversion.
The correlations with reading comprehension are less promising, as well. By grade 8, that correlation drops to about .50 (Baker, Biancarosa, Park, Bousselot, Smith, Baker, . . . Tindal, 2015; Barth, Stuebing, Fletcher, Denton, Vaughn, & Francis, 2014; Denton, Barth, Fletcher, Wexler, Vaughn, Cirino, P. T., . . . Francis, 2011; Schatschneider, Buck, Torgesen, Wagner, Hassler, Hecht, & Powell-Smith, 2004). Fluency explains about 25% of the variance in middle school reading comprehension, about half that evident in the primary grades.
There is one more important difference that should be considered.
Oral reading fluency tends to top out around 175-200wcpm. That’s about as fluent as one gets, including the best readers. Once kids reach that range there’s no reason to think additional teaching will be beneficial.
I looked at the fluency numbers for the 90th and 75th percentiles across the grades. In the primary grades, even the kids who reach those high percentiles are not yet in that 175-200wcpm range. There may be a handful of young readers who max out on fluency, very few. Primary grade teachers can be confident that all or almost all their students will benefit from fluency instruction.
In grades 6-8, the kids who reach the 90th percentile in fluency do well enough that there would be no need for additional fluency teaching. Perhaps some early year work to ensure recovery of those summer losses is in order, but a significant number of middle school kids would no longer need fluency instruction. At grades 7 and 8, the averages for the 75th percentile are tantalizingly close to the target range, suggesting that many of these students wouldn’t benefit from more fluency instruction either.
No wonder middle and high school teachers aren’t thrilled about teaching fluency. Growth is slow and not likely to be obvious to students or teachers, the gains often dissipate quickly, many of their students don’t need any or much fluency support, and the payoffs of that support are likely to have relatively less of an impact on reading comprehension.
Nevertheless, fluency instruction makes great sense in middle school – and for many kids in high school, too.
My argument? Although gains are harder to discern, the norms show that real fluency progress can be made during those years. Likewise, there are many secondary students who don’t need fluency work, but many more students perform in a range that would benefit from this teaching. It would be unwise to write off the bottom 80% of kids because the top 20% no longer would benefit.
Finally, and most importantly, fluency still explains 25% of reading comprehension variance. That means fluency work can make your students better readers, a proposition supported by some experimental studies. Research reviews and meta-analyses (NICHD, 2000; Therrien, 2004) have determined that fluency instruction can improve reading comprehension, though these analyses haven’t separated the elementary and secondary data. But there are studies that show positive fluency and comprehension gains from fluency teaching (Landreth & Young, 2021; Manset-Williamson & Nelson, 2005; Marchand-Martella, Martella, Orlob, & Ebey, 2000; Roundy & Roundy, 2009; Scammacca, Roberts, Vaughn, Edmonds, Wexler, Reutebuch, & Torgesen, 2007; Scarborough, 2001; Therrien & Hughes, 2008; Wexler, Vaughn, Edmonds, & Reutebuch, 2008).
There are exceptions to this pattern, however. For example, in one study (Spencer & Manis, 2010), kids aged 10-15 made considerable improvement in fluency, but their gains didn’t transfer to reading comprehension. In another, comprehension effects were seen for some students but not for others (Still & Flynt, 2012).
There are a couple of possibilities for why that may be. One explanation considers the limitations of fluency instruction – what it can provide and what it can’t, and the other compares the forms of fluency instruction that have and have not impacted comprehension. That information should help guide what we do with fluency and older students, the topic for the next blog in this series. I hope this entry has made a sufficiently realistic but persuasive case for teaching fluency in the middle and high school grades. Next time we’ll explore what that teaching should look like.
References
Baker, D. L., Biancarosa, G., Park, B. J., Bousselot, T., Smith, J., Baker, S. K., . . . Tindal, G. (2015). Validity of CBM measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension on high-stakes reading assessments in grades 7 and 8. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(1), 57-104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9505-4
Barth, A. E., Stuebing, K. K., Fletcher, J. M., Denton, C. A., Vaughn, S., & Francis, D. (2014). The effect of reading duration on the reliability and validity of middle school students’ ORF performance. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 40(1), 53-64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534508414545643
Denton, C. A., Barth, A. E., Fletcher, J. M., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., Cirino, P. T., . . . Francis, D. J. (2011). The relations among oral and silent reading fluency and comprehension in middle school: Implications for identification and instruction of students with reading difficulties. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15(2), 109. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888431003623546
Dickens, R. H., & Meisinger, E. B. (2016). Examining the effects of skill level and reading modality on reading comprehension. Reading Psychology, 37(2), 318-337. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2015.1055869
Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006). Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. Reading Teacher, 59(7),636–644.
Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702). Eugene, OR: Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon.
Kuhn, M. R., & Stahl, S. A. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1037/022-0663.95.1.3
Landreth, S. J., & Young, C. (2021). Developing fluency and comprehension with the secondary fluency routine. Journal of Educational Research, 114(3), 252-262. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2021.1910475
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Roundy, A. R., & Roundy, P. T. (2009). The effect of repeated reading on student fluency: Does practice always make perfect? International Journal of Social Sciences, 4(1), 54-59.
Scammacca, N., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., Edmonds, M., Wexler, J., Reutebuch, C. K., & Torgesen, J. (2007). Reading interventions for adolescent struggling readers: A meta-analysis with implications for practice. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction.
Schatschneider, C., Buck, J., Torgesen, J., Wagner, R., Hassler, L., Hecht, S., & Powell-Smith, K. (2004). A multivariate study of individual differences in performance on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test: A brief report. Retrieved from Florida Center for Reading Research Web site http://www.fcrr.org/technicalreports/multi_variate_study_december2004.pdf
Spencer, S. A., & Manis, F. R. (2010). The effects of a fluency intervention program on the fluency and comprehension outcomes of middle-school students with severe reading deficits. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 25(2), 76-86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5826.2010.00305.x
Still, K. L., & Flynt, C. A. (2012). Does repeated reading improve fluency and comprehension for struggling adolescent readers? Journal of American Academy of Special Education Professionals, 7(1), 152-175. https://doi.org/110.64546/jaasep.172
Therrien, W. J. (2004). Fluency and comprehension gains as a result of repeated reading: A meta-analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 25(4), 252-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/07419325040250040801
Therrien, W. J., & Hughes, C. A. (2008). Comparison of repeated reading and question generation on students’ reading fluency and comprehension. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 6(1), 1-16.
Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., Edmonds, M., & Reutebuch, C. K. (2008). A synthesis of fluency interventions for secondary struggling readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21(4), 317-347. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-007-9085-7
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