You are right to have some caution around this as a blanket goal for your school. Make no mistake- extensive research underscores the value of fluency instruction in terms of both improving oral reading fluency (ORF) and accuracy itself, but also reading comprehension. While appropriate fluency rates are not the primary goal for students (that would be comprehension), fluency and comprehension are interrelated, such that progress in one supports progress in the other, particularly in the lower elementary grades. Fluent reading is a good indicator that the reader understands the text, especially when also read with appropriate expression (or prosody) similar to that of oral language, with natural phrasing and inflection. Also consider that progress monitoring oral reading fluency rates is objectively easier than tracking comprehension. So, on the surface, the decree to improve students’ fluency rates across a school makes logical sense, but unfortunately it is not entirely sound logic.
While ORF is strongly related to overall reading competence, it is still a proxy for proficient reading and can mislead educators if treated as the end goal. We have solid research with ORF benchmarks that are important to consider for designing instructional targets. But while the threshold for ORF rates is typically set at the 50th percentile for each grade, this is not a magic number that will guarantee success. Further, the progress students with the most significant reading challenges and older students (those in upper elementary and beyond) demonstrate in their ORF may not predict their reading comprehension in the same way it does for younger or typically developing students.
Think of ORF as a temperature check; it’s a relatively fast and reliable way for someone to see a clear symptom of an underlying problem. If someone has a higher than average temperature, they are likely sick, and if a student’s ORF falls below the 50th percentile for their grade, they are most likely in need of additional support. But this temperature check has limitations: it doesn’t tell you what that underlying problem actually is for either the fever or for a student’s literacy development. The temperature check also does not actually provide a clean bill of health for someone without a fever, similar to appropriate ORF rates not promising that the student understood the text. In both cases, a bit of variance from the target number might be completely normal. Importantly, if a school wanted to improve the overall health and well-being of their students, tracking their progress based on lowering students’ temperatures would be ill-advised. Once fevers are lowered to normal body temperatures, continuing to lower this temperature ceases to be beneficial in the same way that we don’t want students to continue to increase their rate of reading to become faster and faster.
The intent is to read at the speed needed to comprehend the text. This is why novels can often be read at a much faster rate than a biology textbook, for example. The cognitive load tends to be much higher for a textbook because there are additional limiting factors to comprehension (e.g., advanced vocabulary, unfamiliar syntax, little background knowledge, etc.). It’s absolutely appropriate for skilled readers to read challenging texts at a slower rate in order to support their comprehension. So, when students are trying to tackle texts that are increasingly linguistically complex, we need to make sure that they’re able to read words accurately and effortlessly so they can focus on the meaning of the text rather than decoding the words. However, we don’t want to encourage the false belief that faster is better. The real goal is that your students are reading with enough accuracy, automaticity, and prosody necessary to support their comprehension of any given text. Only- or even primarily- looking at ORF can oversimplify this guiding north star.
The bottom line is that ORF is an important indicator that we have for tracking a student’s literacy progress, but it may oversimplify the complexity of proficient reading in some cases. Not all students need to increase their fluency rates, and encouraging them to do so may actually be a detriment to their comprehension. Other students may be reading at a rate that supports their comprehension even if it falls short of the benchmarks we typically see cited. So the takeaway is that while a universal screener that collects ORF rates is important, the solution is highly unlikely to be that all students should receive a fluency intervention focused on increased reading rate. I hope this information helps to continue moving the conversation forward in your school!
