Identification of struggling readers or at risk of reading difficulties with one-minute fluency measures

Abstract

Background To identify readers who are struggling or at risk of reading difficulties, reference standards in oral reading fluency (ORF) are used to conduct an assessment that is based on a widely reported method known as curriculum-based measurement (CBM), which itself is based on 1-min fluency measures. The purpose of this study was to evaluate students’ ORF (with a 1-min fluency measure) to characterize their fluency and to determine references of appropriate development in reading at the 50th percentile. Method For this study, a database of readings made available by the Learning Studies Research Laboratory was used. This database consisted of 365 readings by elementary-school students from the third to fifth grades in two cities in the interior of the state of São Paulo from two different public school systems that use the same teaching methodology. The data consisted of digital audio recordings of the passage “The Umbrella” (text suitable for schooling levels) of the Protocol for Assessment of Reading Comprehension procedure. For this procedure, three steps were performed: step 1—listening to the 365 readings and assessing the scores for the number of words read correctly per minute; step 2—the calculation of the mean and percentiles for each grade; and step 3—the adaptation of the reference table to indicate students eligible to receive reading fluency intervention. Results Third-year students who correctly read 86 or more words per minute, fourth-year students who correctly read 104 or more words per minute, and fifth-year students who correctly read 117 or more words per minute were considered students who had made adequate progress in reading. Conclusion It was possible to classify students based on the 1-min fluency measures, with reference intervals of words read correctly per minute per school year (for the third, fourth, and fifth years) for those who were making adequate progress in reading and reference intervals for those who were considered readers who were struggling or at risk of reading difficulties.

The Role of Metacognition (Metacomprehension) and Inferential Ability on Reading Comprehension Ability

“…Planning is included as a significant predictor of the performance of inferential understanding. This finding indicates that students need skills in planning strategies before reading is carried out so that text understanding is deeper, especially in complex texts and texts that require inferential understanding (Martins & Capellini, 2021;Samiei & Ebadi, 2021). So, it can be concluded that readers who have high reading planning skills can produce quality or deeper understanding and conclusions about texts than students who do not do reading planning.…”

“…Another aspect that interferes with the low level of metacomprehension accuracy is that teachers may use different ways of assessing students' understanding levels. Distraction level theory assumes that, when a reader assesses his or her own understanding, it is influenced by cues that originate from the reading disorder (Majumdar et al, 2021;Martins & Capellini, 2021). Based on inferential assumptions, the metacomprehension assessment was carried out based on the example of the disorder.…”

Translation and cultural adaptation of the HELPS Reading Fluency Program into Brazilian Portuguese: A report of systematic adaptation processes and initial evidence of efficacy

“…Using the median WCPM score across three passage with similar difficulty level is well-substantiated and commonly used as best-practice in determining a student’s ORF. From this score, we identified 29 total students (15 female, 14 male, mean age = 8.51, SD = 0.49) who had highly similar levels of ORF [ M = 64.75 WCPM; approximately the 35th percentile based on norms from Martins and Capellini, 2021 ] and this sample of participants served as our homogenous-reader assessment pool.…”

Effect of family and peer tutoring programs on reading comprehension skills

“…The diverse characteristics of students in the classroom and the provision of the same service for all students encourage teachers to use learning methods that encourage all students to be active so that their potential is optimally revealed. Teachers must be able to embrace all students to be actively involved in participating in the learning process (Hadianto et al, 2022;Martins & Capellini, 2021). So, teachers must use learning methods that are able to embrace the salty students.…”