Fluency: Assessment

Fluency is often thought of as the “bridge” that connects reading foundational skills (phonemic awareness and phonics) to deeper reading skills (vocabulary, comprehension).  Fluency helps students move from learning to read, to reading to learn.

Fluency assessments can be a good indicator of whether or not a child will struggle with reading comprehension. Here are some differences between benchmarking and progress monitoring.

Benchmarking: 

• Given 3 times per year (beginning, midterm, end)
• Given to all students by general education teacher
• Typically 3 different passages are given for one minute each. The median score is taken.
• All students are assessed at their grade level

Progress Monitoring:

• Given anywhere from weekly to monthly depending on the student
• Used to measure whether or not an intervention is working in Tiers 2 and 3
• Given by the person providing intervention
• Typically one passage is given for one minute (cold read)
• Student assessed on their instructional level

If you are using IMSE’s OG with fidelity, it should reflect in fluency scores.  However, by the time a student reaches 8th grade, fluency rate is difficult to change, even with intervention. Always allow for a minimum of 15 weeks to determine whether or not an intervention strategy is working.  If you are looking for an inexpensive, norm-referenced, and comprehensive fluency assessment, look into Acadience Learning.