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Over 90% of the approximately 1,600 districts and 5,283 schools in the United States that have implemented Reading First (www.readingfirstsupport.us) use oral reading fluency (ORF) to screen students for reading problems and monitor reading progress over time (Greenberg, S., Howe, K., Levi, S., & Roberts, G., personal communications, 2006). Other major education reforms, such as response to intervention (Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act, 2004), have also significantly increased the use of ORF to assess reading performance. Common across these reforms is a focus on intervening early and intensively to address reading problems. An extensive research base in special education and general education provides strong support for the use of ORF as a measure of reading proficiency, but few studies have investigated the use of this measure in a nationwide federal reading initiative such as Reading First. This study addresses the use of ORF as an index of reading proficiency and as a measure of student progress over time in the context of Reading First in Oregon (http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/results/?id=96). The roots of ORF lie in curriculum-based measurement (CBM), a set of procedures for measuring academic proficiency in basic skill areas including reading, spelling, written expression, and mathematics (Deno, 1985; Deno & Mirkin, 1977; Fuchs & Fuchs, 2002; Shinn, 1989, 1998). ORF is the most thoroughly studied of all CBM measures and has generated the most empirical support for its use. On ORF, students typically read a story or passage from grade-level reading material, and the number of words read correctly in 1 min constitutes the student's performance score. There is strong theoretical support for reading fluency as an important component of reading competence. LaBerge and Samuels (1974) hypothesized that automaticity of reading was directly connected to reading comprehension. Based on this model of reading development, it is hypothesized that effortless word-level reading frees up attention resources that can be devoted specifically to comprehension (Adams, 1990; National Reading Panel, 2000). Posner and Snyder (1975) suggested two context-based expectancy processes that facilitate word recognition. The first consists of "automatic fast-spreading semantic activation" (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003, p. 720) that does not require conscious attention. The second "involves slow-acting, attention-demanding, conscious use of surrounding context for word identification" (Jenkins et al., 2003, p. 720). Stanovich (1980) proposed that reading fluency results from bottom-up (print driven) and top-down processes (meaning driven) that operate concurrently when a reader confronts a word in context. Skilled readers rarely rely on conscious bottom-up processes to read words because word recognition is virtually automatic. Poor readers rely more on the context of the sentence to read words accurately because their bottom-up processes are inefficient and unreliable (Stanovich, 2000). Although there are important differences between these models, they all assert that efficient word recognition processes free up resources for comprehension. In addition, many studies have empirically demonstrated the association between ORF and overall reading proficiency, including comprehension. ORF as an Index of Reading Proficiency Deno, Mirkin, and Chiang (1982) published the first validity study on ORF. Five CBM measures were administered to students in special and general education (Grades 1-5). Students read words in a word list, read underlined words in passages, read words in intact passages (i.e., ORF), identified missing words in passages (i.e., cloze), and stated the meaning of underlined words in passages. ORF was the strongest measure, correlating with published criterion measures between .71 and .91. ORF correlated higher with published measures of reading comprehension than did cloze or word meaning, which were considered more direct measures of overall reading. … |
