Fluency            

The Matthew Effect describes what happens over time when some children enter into a positive feedback loop, whereby those who learn to read and break the code with relative ease experience a positive affect and are able to read the text that they are given in schools with fluency. That fluency develops a level of automaticity and because they develop automaticity with sounds and words they’re cognitive work space is freed to operate on the meaning of print, the purpose of why children are engaged in it. And so the world opens up to children who have that cognitive space left, who have automatized the code and words.

So, as a result they find reading to be discouraging, it’s less satisfying and this feedback loop begins where because it’s not pleasurable, because it’s difficult, they don’t engage in it. And because they don’t engage in it as often they don’t develop the automaticity and on and on you go. Now that’s even further compounded by the fact that these educational have not’s are given material that’s well beyond their reading ability. So, the cycle gets exacerbated because we don’t tack or calibrate children’s reading level with the print we give them. And so the cycle just gets worse and worse.  

Anne Cunningham, Director of the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California-Berkeley. Source: COTC Interview: - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/cunningham.htm#MatthewEffect

Radiant Effects of Disfluent Reading

One of the experiences that can bring home what we’re talking about here is to look at a child who’s struggling with reading. Try to read a passage in a book. Reading that for a fluent reader would involve sixty or seventy words a minute. I have video tapes back from my prior life as a researcher where we have first graders who are taking seven or eight minutes to get through a short, age appropriate paragraph. By the time they get to end of that paragraph, struggling to sound out the words, with parents help, I can’t remember what the child said ten minutes ago, much less the child who is struggling with all the consequences of reading failure.

It’s like any skill, once you’ve acquired it it seems easy, it seems natural. I think parents, teachers and children don’t appreciate how extraordinarily difficult this is. And how if the bar of expectations for what you’re supposed to be doing is way in advance of what you are actually able to do, then the emotional consequences, the frustration feeds into the process. So, you have an explosive mixture of delays in the development of phonologically related skills, delays in the development of semantic knowledge and background knowledge and a contrast between what everybody knows you’re supposed to be able to do and what you are actually able to do. That interferes with the process, as well as a performance problem that often leaves children showing that they’re able to do less than they’re actually able to do because the frustration and emotions, the demands of the task interfere with the child expressing what she’s actually able to do if she relaxed and wasn’t concerned about performance.

Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, Ex-Director (2002-08), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Source: COTC Interview:  http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/whitehurst.htm#ExtraordinarilyDifficult

Vocabulary and Fluency

Dr. Timothy Shanahan: From the very beginning we have to teach a whole variety of things to kids. In fact, in terms of what I tell teachers or how I organize things in schools that I work in, is that there really are four big things that have to be addressed with literacy instruction.

One of them has to do with words. Initially, you’re talking word recognition. You’re talking all those phonics skills and letters and stuff like that. Eventually, that goes away and it becomes about working with word meanings, working with vocabulary, building up kids’ knowledge of academic language. That’s one piece if it.

The second piece of it is what’s come to be called fluency, which really means you cannot just recognize words, but you must string those words together so that if you read a text aloud it would sound like language. The words would be grouped properly. You would have the emphasis on the right ones.

David Boulton: And it would be flowing at a pace that is consistent with our attention, our natural flow of listening.

Dr. Timothy Shanahan:  You’ve got it, exactly. 

Timothy Shanahan, Past-President (2006) International Reading Association; Member, National Reading Panel; Chair, National Reading Panel; Professor and Director, University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Literacy.  Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/shanahan.htm#VocabularyFluencyComprehensionWriting

Connections Between Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension

Dr. Reid Lyon:  If I had my druthers, instructional methods wouldn’t be the big deal out there. What would be the big deal is if teachers could ask themselves what does it take to learn to read? It takes phonemic awareness, it takes phonics, it takes the rapid application of those print level skills to text - fluency, it’s called. Even when they do all of those kinds of things, phonemic awareness and phonics and fluency, if kids don’t have vocabulary they won’t understand what the heck they’re reading. So, they’ve got to have vocabulary. We’ve got kids with good phonemic awareness, good phonics, good fluency, good vocabulary – and they still don’t comprehend well. And the reason is they’re not active, they don’t structure their interaction with the print, they don’t summarize, they don’t predict and so on.

G. Reid Lyon, Past- Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Current senior vice president for research and evaluation with Best Associates.  Source: COTC Interview - http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/lyon.htm#Teachersquestions

Fluency and the DIBELS Assessment

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: ...The piece that's been missing that represents, I think, a new genre of assessment is assessment that's timely, efficient, parsimonious, targeted to the most essential active ingredients that kids can participate in their writing system readily. It's recursive, in that you get feedback from it, and has the capacity to go to scale with the information technology that's available.

For example, most assessment we think about is outcome assessment, achievement tests and high stakes tests.

David Boulton: Which is way downstream from where the learning is actually happening.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Exactly, downstream — end of third grade, end of fourth grade, end of eighth grade, end of twelfth grade.

David Boulton: Or end of the actual stream of flow that's at the core of the progress.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: Absolutely.

David Boulton: Whether it’s a day later or an hour later, it's still downstream.

Dr. Edward Kame'enui: That's right. It's not timely, it's not in real time. The assessment system we've been working with, I think, is a significant departure from traditional assessment because it takes a sample of behavior in one minute, a one-minute sample of a child's reading behavior. It's fluency based and it's predictive of the future.

So, if you think about it, what I'm asserting is that in a one-minute sample you can get a sufficient representation of a child's ability to negotiate the alphabetic writing system. And that sample is predictive of how that child is going to be down the road. If I take a sample of a child's behavior in kindergarten, it's predictive of how that child will do at the end of third grade. Now that, to me, is an assessment system that is powerful, is necessary, and also is one that we can get to scale, and that's what we're using right now.

...Then the third piece we rely on is oral reading fluency. This is a measure of a child reading a passage that he or she has not read before, a novel passage at grade level, reading it for one minute and we count the number of words they read correctly. We don't ask any comprehension questions, yet that indicator of correct words read per minute is highly predictive of children's comprehension ability.