minimum reading fluency necessary for comprehension among second-grade students

Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 48(2), 2011 C© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com DOI: 10.1002/pits.20531

MINIMUM READING FLUENCY NECESSARY FOR COMPREHENSION AMONGSECOND-GRADE STUDENTS

MATTHEW K. BURNS, HEATHER KWOKA, BECKY LIM, MELISSA CRONE, KATHERINE HAEGELE,DAVID C. PARKER, SHAWNA PETERSEN, AND SARAH E. SCHOLIN

University of Minnesota

The current study examined the relationship between oral reading fluency (ORF) and readingcomprehension for students in second grade. A total of 84 participants were randomly assigned toone of four conditions that involved reading a grade-appropriate passage with either 0%, 10%, 20%,or 30% scrambled words and answering subsequent comprehension questions. The correlationcoefficient between ORF and the number of comprehension questions correctly answered wasr = .54. Receiver operating characteristics were then used to empirically derive a minimum ORFscore necessary for comprehension, indicating that when these students read 63 words correct perminute they successfully comprehended what they read. Finally, the diagnostic accuracy of thederived criterion of 63 words read correctly per minute was tested and resulted in overall correctclassification of .80. C© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Reading fluency is the rate at which readers accurately recognize individual words withinconnected text (Carnine, Silbert, Kame’enui, & Tarver, 2004) and is clearly an area of interestamong researchers and practitioners (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001). Moreover, fluencyinstruction has been identified as a critical component of effective reading instruction (NationalReading Panel, 2000), especially in the second and third grades (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Thisemphasis is due not to the perceived importance of fluent reading per se, but to the close link betweenfluency and reading comprehension. The seminal automatic information processing theory (LaBerge& Samuels, 1974) proposes that children who slowly decode words one sound at a time will not beable to retain the meaning of words they have read after completing a sentence or paragraph. Thus,automatic word recognition is needed for the reader’s finite attention and processing resources to bedevoted to comprehension of the text (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974).

Because rapid word recognition is required for comprehension, many studies have focused onreading fluency in relation to comprehension and have found correlation coefficients that generallyfell between .50 and .70 (Berninger, Abbot, Vermeulen, & Fulton, 2006; Burns et al., 2002; Jenkins,Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003; Samuels, 1979). Although oral language comprehensionhas been shown to be more closely related to reading comprehension than oral reading fluency (ORF),ORF does account for unique variance in reading comprehension assessments (Spear-Swerling,2006). Thus, previous research has effectively used reading fluency interventions to increase readingcomprehension (Alber-Morgan, Ramp, Anderson, & Martin, 2007; Burns, Dean, & Foley, 2004;Freeland, Skinner, Jackson, McDaniel, & Smith, 2000; Therrien, 2004), which suggests that inaddition to vocabulary and verbal reasoning interventions, increasing reading fluency is an effectivepath to comprehension (Berninger et al., 2006).

Although closely related, reading fluency is functionally different from automatic recognitionof words in isolation (Berninger & Richards, 2002). Thus, the two components should be assessedand remediated independently, with the best approach to assessing reading fluency being the rateof oral text reading (Berninger, Abbott, Billingsley, & Nagy, 2001). ORF is frequently used inschools as a general outcome measure for reading, especially in the elementary grades (Deno, 2003),and is often used as a proxy for reading comprehension measures, because ORF assessments are

Correspondence to: Matthew K. Burns, 341 Education Science Building, 56 E. River Road, Minneapolis,MN 55455. E-mail: [email protected]

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Reading Fluency for Comprehension among Second Grade Students 125

easier, shorter in duration, and closely correlated with comprehension until approximately sixthgrade (Silberglitt, Burns, Madyun, & Lail, 2006). Moreover, goals are often established for ORF forintervention purposes, and progress toward those goals can easily be monitored (Deno, 2003).

Monitoring student growth in ORF has been consistently shown to provide useful instructionaldata that lead to increased student learning (Deno, 2003; Fuchs et al., 2001). Moreover, the response-to-intervention (RTI) approach to resource allocation requires that children who demonstrate lowskill levels receive additional resources to enhance their learning (Burns & VanDerHeyden, 2006).Therefore, whether or not a student is reading at a target rate and/or whether or not he or she demon-strates adequate ORF progress could decide if the student receives interventions or entitlements suchas special education, which is a high-stakes decision and suggests the need for scientifically basedcriteria (Salvia, Ysseldyke, & Bolt, 2007).

Most RTI models use a normative approach to identify ORF goals (Fuchs, 2003), but some usepublished standards such as those associated with the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early LiteracySkills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 1996) or data from a national norming sample (Hasbrouk &Tindal, 2006). Criterion-referenced data are especially useful for instructional planning and evaluat-ing academic interventions (Salvia & Ysseldyke, 2004), but the standards associated with DIBELShave been questioned because they led to inconsistent decisions (Jenkins, 2003). The reading mea-sures within DIBELS have demonstrated strong sensitivity and specificity when identifying childrenat risk for reading failure (Hintze, Ryan, & Stoner, 2003), but the ORF criteria (e.g., 40 words/minuteat the end of first grade) identified over 70% of students in one study as at risk for reading failure(Good, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 2001).

Burns et al. (2002) conducted a study in which they artificially slowed student ORF to measurethe effect on comprehension and to determine a potential ORF criterion. The authors presenteda series of reading passages to 49 third- and fourth-grade students with increasing percentagesof scrambled words (0%, 10%, 20%, and 30%) and asked them to read the passages orally andanswer comprehension questions. The mean ORF decreased from 95.55 words correct per minutein the 0% condition to 32.28 words correct per minute for the 30% condition, and the percentageof comprehension questions answered correctly also decreased from 82.37% to 48.28%. Next, theauthors compared the percentage of comprehension questions answered correctly to a criterionto determine in which passages the students demonstrated adequate comprehension. The previousstudy then found the mean words read correctly per minute (wcpm) for the passages with the highestpercentages of scrambled words at which the students demonstrated adequate comprehension. Theresult suggested that a minimum of 50 wcpm among third and fourth graders was needed forcomprehension to occur, which was presented as a potential empirically derived goal for strugglingreaders (Burns et al., 2002).

Early interventions in critical skill areas are likely to reduce the incidence of low academicachievement (Jenkins & O’Connor, 2002; Schatschneider & Torgesen, 2004; Torgesen, 2002), whichsuggests that interventions that occur by the second grade have a higher likelihood of success (Juel,1988; Snow et al., 1998). Reading fluency has also been shown to be important to comprehension insecond grade (Berninger et al., 2006; Schwaneflugel et al., 2006), and second grade is when childrentransition from beginning reading skills to reading fluency (Chall, 1983). In fact, differences inORF between normal and struggling readers occur as early as first grade (Speece & Ritchey, 2005).Therefore, empirically derived ORF criteria, especially ones that link ORF and comprehension,could be useful data for interventionists, but little is known about reading development in earlyelementary school (Kame’enui & Simmons, 2001).

The purpose of the current study was to extend the Burns et al. (2002) study to examinethe relationship between fluency and comprehension among second-grade students and to derivethe minimum fluency rate necessary for comprehension to occur. The current study extended the

Psychology in the Schools DOI: 10.1002/pits

126 Burns et al.

previous one by using second graders instead of third and fourth graders, by randomly assigning theconditions rather than having each student complete each condition, and by using a receiver operatingcharacteristics (ROC) curve to determine the minimum fluency level needed for comprehension tooccur rather than finding the mean ORF for the passage with the highest level of scrambled words atwhich each student demonstrated sufficient comprehension. The following research questions guidedthe study: (a) what is the magnitude of the relationship between ORF and reading comprehensionfor second-grade students, (b) what is the minimum ORF level necessary for comprehension tooccur among second-grade students, and (c) how well does the ORF level needed for comprehensionadequately identify second-grade children who did not demonstrate sufficient comprehension of areading task?

METHOD

Participants

The participants for the study were 84 second-grade students from two elementary schoolsin Minnesota. The schools were selected because they had multiple second-grade classrooms; oneschool served a rural community and the other was in a more urban setting. The sample consistedof an almost equal representation of females (52.4%, n = 44) and males (47.6%, n = 40), with aslight overrepresentation of females. The ethnicity of the sample included 3.6% (n = 3) African-American students, 4.8% (n = 4) Asian-American students, 82.1% (n = 69) Caucasian students,8.3% (n = 7) Hispanic students, and 1.2% (n = 1) Native American students. The school buildingsthat these students attended served 548 and 415 children between kindergarten and fifth grade, 6.8%and 27.5% of whom were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price lunch programs.

Materials

A grade-appropriate reading passage was randomly selected from the fourth edition of theQualitative Reading Inventory (QRI-4; Leslie & Caldwell, 2006). The passage contained 197 wordsand eight comprehension questions, four explicit (literal) and four implicit (inferential). The manualreported that six or seven of the questions had to be answered correctly to obtain an instructional level.

Estimates of interrater, alternate-form, and internal consistency reliability for the QRI-4 all gen-erally exceed .80 (Leslie & Caldwell, 2006), which is higher than most informal reading inventories(Spector, 2005). The difficulty of the reading passages within the QRI-4 were computed by the testdevelopers using readability formulas based on vocabulary, word frequency, number of syllables,and average sentence length. Comprehension questions for passages in the QRI-4 were developedby having one question address the goal of the protagonist, and the remaining questions focus onthe important details of the story. Each question was then rated by the authors as implicit or explicit,and only those about which the authors agreed were retained (Leslie & Caldwell, 2006).

The passage used in the study was modified to contain a percentage of scrambled words in orderto systematically slow down decoding, while controlling for the reading level of the words used.As in the Burns et al. (2002) study, scrambled words were used rather than simply using passagesof increasing difficulty because once the words were decoded, the child had a greater chance ofknowing the word’s meaning if it was from a grade-appropriate reading level, whereas with wordsfrom a higher reading level, the child may not know the meaning of the word upon decoding, whichwould interfere with comprehension of the passage. The first condition contained 0% scrambledwords, the second had 10% scrambled words, and the third and fourth conditions contained 20%and 30% scrambled words, respectively.

Words were selected to be scrambled using a random number table, and the letters withineach selected word were rearranged randomly using the same method. A number was assigned to



each letter of the word based on its sequential ordering. For example, the letter “h” in “house”was assigned the number 1, “o” was number 2, “u” number 3, “s” number 4, and “e” number 5.The numbers one through five were then randomly selected, the word was rewritten using the newsequence of letters, and the resulting scrambled word was presented the same way every time itappeared in the text. However, words that were included in comprehension questions or listed in therespective manuals as acceptable answers to the questions were not included in the potential pool tobe scrambled.

Procedure

Informed consent letters were sent home to all of the parents in the participating classrooms,and those students who returned signed informed consent letters were included in the study. Approx-imately 56% of the students returned signed informed consent forms. The Burns et al. (2002) studyidentified “average” readers, but we included all readers to attempt to obtain variance in participants’reading skills. After informed consent was obtained, the students accompanied the researchers to aquiet area within the school building but away from their classroom (e.g., a table in the hallway).After student assent was obtained, the students were asked to orally read one passage and to answerorally presented comprehension questions.

The Burns et al. (2002) study required each student to read all four conditions with differentpassages. The current study modified that procedure and randomly assigned each student to onecondition. Thus, only one passage was used, with four different levels of scrambled words. Thisapproach was used to reduce the task demands and length of time required for each individualstudent and to introduce random assignment to the design. Students read the entire passage orallyand were timed to determine a wcpm ORF score. The researcher followed along as the student readthe passage and orally provided unscrambled and scrambled words that the student did not decodewithin 3 seconds.

Upon completion of the passage, the ORF score was recorded, and the student was orallyasked comprehension questions assigned to that passage. Reading comprehension was assessed aseither pass or fail based on correctly answering a minimum number of comprehension questions,as predetermined by the standardized tool. The criteria for passing the comprehension section werebased on the high end of the instructional level criteria presented by the QRI-4 manual, whichequaled seven out of eight (87.5%) correctly answered questions.

Analyses

The data for the study consisted of reading fluency in wcpm and the percentage of comprehen-sion questions answered correctly. Mean ORF scores and percentage of comprehension questionsanswered correctly for the four conditions were analyzed with two analyses of variance using Bon-ferroni corrected alpha levels of .025 to determine significance. The more conservative .025 was usedbecause there were two analyses and using .05 might have resulted in a higher likelihood for error.Next, ORF data were analyzed using a ROC curve, with the coordinates of the curve determiningcriteria for reading comprehension. ROC curve analyses are frequently used in the social sciencesto identify the score that provides the best balance between false positive and false negative errors(VanDerHeyden & Burns, 2010). In other words, the data could suggest a potential ORF cutscore andscores that fell below that criterion would suggest poor performance on the criterion (i.e., readingcomprehension). The current analyses used an a priori–determined specificity score of .70 to beconsistent with previous research (McGlinchey & Hixson, 2004; Stage & Jacobsen, 2001).

Although ROC analyses are potentially useful to determine cutscores for a particular set ofdata, they can be misused and should be tested for diagnostic accuracy (VanDerHeyden & Burns,


128 Burns et al.

2010). Thus, after the minimum fluency score necessary for adequate comprehension to occur wasobtained, the ORF criterion was tested using the five discriminative analyses approaches outlinedby Stage and Jacobsen (2001). Specifically, we tested the sensitivity (true positive), specificity (truenegative), positive predictive power, negative predictive power and overall correct classification ofthe ORF criterion.

Interobserver Agreement

Approximately 25% of the participants were also observed by a second researcher in orderto assess interobserver agreement (IOA). Each word was independently rated as read correctly ornot as the student read, and each comprehension question was independently rated as correct orincorrect. IOA for words read correctly was computed by counting the number of words that wererated consistently as incorrect or correct by each researcher and dividing that number by the totalnumber of words in the passage. The percentage of words that were rated consistently ranged from97.4% to 100%, with a mean of 98.6%. IOA for reading comprehension was computed by dividingthe number of consistently rated comprehension questions by the total number of questions, whichresulted in an average of 100%.

RESULTS

The distribution of the data was examined before conducting analyses. The mean ORF was58.80 (SD = 25.70) and the mean percentage of comprehension questions answered correctly was43.92% (SD = 27.03%). The estimates of skew for the two sets of data were 0.85 for ORF and 0.43 forcomprehension, with a standard error of 0.26. Kurtosis estimates were 0.73 and -0.71, respectively,with a standard error of 0.52. Therefore the data were normally distributed and parametric analyseswere conducted.

Before the analysis for the research questions, two one-way analyses of variance (ANOVA)were conducted to determine if scrambling the words affected fluency and comprehension. Asshown in Table 1, the ANOVA resulted in a significant effect for both ORF, F (3, 80) = 19.98,p < .025, and comprehension, (3, 80) = 13.09, p < .025. Sheffe post hoc comparisons of the fourconditions indicate that fluency scores were significantly higher in the 0% scrambled condition thanin the 10% 20%, or 30% scrambled condition, p < .05. All other differences in fluency betweenfluency conditions were not significant. Comprehension scores were significantly higher for the0% scrambled condition than for the 20% or 30% scrambled condition, p < .05. The difference incomprehension between the 0% and 10% conditions was not significant.

Table 1Means, Standard Deviations, ANOVA Statistics for the Four Reading Conditions

0% Condition 10% Condition 20% Condition 30% Conditionn = 21 n = 20 n = 22 n = 21

Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD Mean SD F

Oral reading fluency 86.43 26.53 57.73 20.87 47.69 15.02 43.82 4.58 19.98∗

Comprehension 67.00 23.17 48.95 28.95 32.93 18.30 27.57 18.64 13.09∗

Note. Comprehension data are percentage of questions answered correctly with percentage signs omitted.∗p < .025.



Relationship between Fluency and Comprehension

The first research question inquired about the magnitude of the relationship between ORFand comprehension. A Pearson product–moment correlation was determined between ORF andthe percentage of comprehension questions answered correctly. The results found a moderate andsignificant correlation (r = .54, p < .01).

Minimum Fluency for Comprehension

The second research question inquired about the minimum fluency level necessary for compre-hension. Coordinates of the ROC curve were examined to find the minimum ORF level necessary forcomprehension, using a specificity level of .70. ORF was the predictor variable and the percentageof reading comprehension was the dependent variable, with 80% or higher being the positive state.Using these criteria, the data identified 20 students who demonstrated adequate comprehension and64 who did not, and the coordinates of the curve at that point resulted in a value of 63.00 wcpm.

Predicting Comprehension with Fluency Criteria

The derived reading fluency criteria for reading comprehension were tested with the fivediagnostic efficiency statistics of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive power, negative predictivepower, and overall correct classification (Stage & Jacobsen, 2001). Table 2 displays the diagnosticefficiency statistics in the same visual format used in previous research (McGlinchey & Hixson,2004). The positive predictive power (.93) was higher than the negative predictive power (.55).However, sensitivity and specificity were relatively high (.80), and the overall correct classificationwas .80. In this case, sensitivity refers to a student who read less than 63 wcpm who also answeredless than 87.5% of the questions correctly, which is a true positive. Specificity represents studentswho read at least 63 wcpm who also answered at least 87.5% of the questions correctly, which is atrue negative. These data suggested that using 63 wcpm accurately identified 80% of the studentswho did not demonstrate adequate comprehension and 80% of the students who did comprehendwhat they read.

Cohen’s Kappa (1960) was also calculated to estimate chance agreement using marginal per-centages of agreement (Stage & Jacobsen, 2001). Diagnostic efficiency for the fluency score was.52. Thus, the newly derived minimum fluency criteria for comprehension were 52% above chancefor second grade.

Table 2Diagnostic Efficiency Statistics for Demonstrating Adequate ComprehensionUsing Empirically Derived Reading Fluency Criteria (Words Correct perMinute: wcpm) for Second-Grade Students

Reading Comprehension

Reading Fluency Fail Pass Total

<63 wcpm n = 51 n = 04 n = 55a b

≥63 wcpm n = 13 n = 16 n = 29c d

Total n = 64 n = 20 n = 84

Note. Sensitivity = a/(a + c) = 0.80, specificity = d/(b + d) = 0.80, positivepredictive power = a/(a + b) = 0.93 negative predictive power = d/(c + d) = 0.55,overall correct classification = (a + d)/N = 0.80.


130 Burns et al.

DISCUSSION

Data obtained in the current study gave moderate correlations between ORF and comprehensionfor students in the second grade and computed a minimum ORF score necessary for comprehensionof 63 wcpm. These data were consistent with previous research that suggested that accurate and rapidexecution of a skill was important to successful completion of that skill (Binder, 1996). Moreover,results in the current study are consistent with previous research that found correlation coefficientsthat generally fall between .50 and .70 (Berninger et al., 2006; Burns et al., 2002; Jenkins et al.,2003; Samuels, 1979). Thus, there appears to be a relationship between fluency and comprehensionfor children in second grade, which has also been shown in previous research (Berninger et al., 2006;Schwaneflugel et al., 2006).

Previous researchers found that ORF measures correctly predicted below-satisfactory and sat-isfactory scores on group-administered reading comprehension tests 77% of the time (McGlinchey& Hixson, 2004) and found a diagnostic efficiency of 34% above chance (Stage & Jacobsen, 2001).Moreover, a Kappa coefficient of .52 represents moderate agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977). Thus,the current data met or exceeded the estimates from previous studies and suggested that the readingfluency criteria sufficiently predicted comprehension of the passage.

These results lend some empirical support for 63 wcpm as a minimum ORF score amongsecond grade students because it closely corresponds to indicators of some risk at the end of secondgrade (Good, Simmons, Kame’enui, Raminski, & Wallin, 2002). Moreover, 63 wcpm was alsosomewhat consistent with previous research that found that approximately 50 wcpm was neededfor comprehension among third- and fourth-grade students (Burns et al., 2002). Thus, it seems thata range of approximately 40 to 70 words correct/minute is needed for reading comprehension tooccur, but additional research is needed.

The standard deviation for the ORF scores fell from 26.53 in the 0% condition to 4.58 in the30% scrambled words condition. Therefore, there appeared to be substantially more variation inORF data for the more naturalistic stimulus probes. These data also suggest that the differencesin scores for the 30% condition were likely constricted due to the condition, but scores in the 0%condition were allowed to vary as a result of the students’ reading skills. However, the explanation ofwhy the variance in the data decreased is only a hypothesis and suggests an area for future research.

The current study assumes that ORF plays an important role in learning to read and/or is a usefulapproach to assessing reading skills. However, the importance of ORF for reading among normallydeveloping readers is somewhat unclear. This is especially true because the 63-wcpm criteria fellbelow the 50th percentile for ORF data collected in the spring of the school year (Hasbrouck &Tindal, 2006) and probably represented a relatively low threshold. In other words, if a child’s ORFscore falls below the criteria suggested in the current study, then the child will likely require additionalreading instruction or remediation, but questions remain concerning the importance of ORF data fora child who scores above this potential criterion. Thus, ORF data could serve a potentially importantrole in screening children for reading deficits, but may not provide useful information for childrenwhose reading skills are progressing at a typical rate.

Although the data found in the current study are potentially interesting to both researchersand practitioners, some limitations should be considered. First, each student read only one passage,but often ORF assessments involve reading three passages and computing a median. Moreover,demographic data such as reading skills and free or reduced-price lunch status were not available forthe participants, so we did not know how well these data generalized to the population from whichthe students were selected or to other specific populations. It should also be noted that the criteriafor demonstrating adequate comprehension were based on those presented by the QRI-4 manualand although the criteria were quite high, their validity was unknown. Finally, words were randomly



chosen to be scrambled, which is not what students would necessarily experience. For instance,“the” could have been scrambled to “hte,” which could then slow down the student on a word thathe or she would normally have read easily.

The current data suggest the need to replicate this study with a larger and more diverse samplethat encompasses more grades (i.e., first through fourth grade). Moreover, comprehension wasdefined by the current study in a somewhat limited manner. Thus, future research could examinethe relationship between ORF and comprehension with different approaches to operationalizingand measuring reading comprehension. From an intervention perspective, it would be potentiallyinteresting to implement a fluency intervention with a child who fell below the criteria found in thecurrent study until the relevant criterion was met, and then examine if comprehension increased to anacceptable level. It may also be worth examining if the relationship between ORF and comprehensionchanges, beyond what would be expected due to range restriction, for skilled and poor readers. Finally,a comparison between ORF and other skills (e.g., vocabulary development) relevant to readingcomprehension might assist in identifying screening criteria for children who are fluent readers butdemonstrate low comprehension. Studies that identify potentially useful decision-making criteriahave obvious benefits to district administrators, principals, and teachers in this era of accountability.There is a clear benefit to early identification of children with potential reading deficits and toresearching better ways to identify these children. Although the internal and external validity ofthese findings are dependent on replication and/or additional research, these data do suggest that anORF criterion based on reading comprehension seems warranted.

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minimum reading fluency necessary for comprehension among second-grade students

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