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Hi Lisa,

This is a really good question, and you were right to contextualize it with the lens of considering adolescents, as the framing of my response would be different for elementary students.

You may have noticed from Hasbrouck and Tindal’s ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) norms that the growth in oral reading fluency slows significantly after approximately fifth grade. Middle school students continuing to need reading support tend to demonstrate slower response to intervention than younger students in general, and typically developing readers begin to approach proficient, adult-like rates, creating a ceiling effect where growth in reading rate may no longer be expected. Additionally, researchers have noted that the relationship between ORF and reading comprehension weakens across grade levels (Denton et al., 2011). For these reasons, ORF benchmarks are often seen as a less helpful tool for progress monitoring in middle school.

I am curious what role you have with students. Classwide progress monitoring tools for this age may include ORF, but tend to shift towards other measures of reading proficiency, such as maze tasks, comprehension questions, and vocabulary measures.

ORF rates may hold more relevance while progress monitoring intervention students, but that would depend on their instructional targets. Students who are significantly behind and working on foundational reading skills are unlikely to show meaningful progress in their grade-level reading fluency. Consider a 6th grader who had not yet solidified her knowledge of vowel teams before coming to middle school. If, in intervention, she successfully acquired knowledge of <ai>, <oa>, and <ow>, this growth is unlikely to contribute meaningfully to her ability to read a grade-level passage. Sometimes I try to explain this with an analogy of a runner. A casual jogger may begin a training program to increase their speed running a mile. After months of work, they would likely progress significantly. But if I tried to measure their growth by comparing their performance to that of elite athletes, I’m unlikely to see any progress because they would still be minutes behind the other competitors. It may be more appropriate to track and demonstrate this student’s growth with informal measures that you create, such as percent accuracy reading one-syllable words with vowel teams, and track their progress relative to their own baseline performance, rather than that of their peers. Tracking progress in this way might still include measures of fluency, such as capturing her accuracy and automaticity of reading these words in connected sentences or possible decodable passages.

Tracking ORF progress for students in intervention primarily needing support with comprehension may also be inappropriate, due to the aforementioned progressively weakening relationship between these two constructs. A student may improve substantially in areas such as inferencing, background knowledge, vocabulary, or understanding text structure without demonstrating meaningful changes in oral reading rate. In these cases, tracking progress via measurable goals (e.g., independently demonstrating a taught strategy) or progress monitoring tools more directly aligned to the instructional target may provide a more accurate picture of growth.

For a student who reads accurately but slowly, on the other hand, targeting reading rate with fluency-supporting activities and monitoring their progress through ORF rates would be expected. Unfortunately, there is not a widely accepted expectation for how much weekly or monthly growth middle school students “should” demonstrate on grade-level ORF measures, because growth varies considerably based on the student’s baseline reading profile and intervention intensity. In practice, I would focus less on comparing adolescent students to normative growth expectations and more on whether they are demonstrating steady improvement relative to their own baseline performance over time. For students whose instructional targets genuinely align with fluency, even small but consistent gains may represent meaningful progress at this age. It may be helpful to track these rates weekly or biweekly using a line chart, but judge your students’ performance trend on a monthly or even quarterly basis. Looking at long-term trends using relatively frequent data points will help contextualize any outlier performance that might be caused by a particularly challenging passage and prove overall growth throughout the year, even if it has been a bit slow.