Research School Network: Fluency as an indicator of reading competency Reflections on the individual and combined roles of explicit teaching and diagnostic assessment
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Fluency as an indicator of reading competency
Reflections on the individual and combined roles of explicit teaching and diagnostic assessment
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by Unity Research School
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Lauren Meadows, Curriculum Director and Evidence Lead within Unity Schools Partnership.
The EEF Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 guidance report sets out a clear ambition to prioritise reading fluency as the bedrock of becoming a competent reader. Reading fluency can be defined as reading with accuracy (reading words correctly), automaticity (reading words at an appropriate speed without great effort) and prosody (appropriate stress and intonation). However, there are many misconceptions about what reading fluency is and is not which we seek to dispel!
Actively teaching reading fluency to struggling pupils can be beneficial so our efforts to ensure every pupil, especially those experiencing the impact of socio-economic disadvantage, in every classroom and context in school provided every opportunity to grow and improve their reading fluency is a crucial aspect of our practice. We draw on two key recommendations in particular:
Recommendation 2: Support pupils to develop fluent reading capabilities
We have seen first-hand in our schools the transformative power of explicitly teaching fluency as the bridge between phonics and comprehension. Indeed, it is now so highly valued as a strategy for universal intervention that we have included it as a pedagogical place-holder in our lesson structure at all Key Stages in all subjects. This means that teachers in all classrooms use prosodic reading strategies as a vehicle to introduce and explore text in any subject discipline – we recognise this as valuable for all but vital for some.
“When pupils read fluently, their cognitive resources can be redirected from focusing on decoding and onto comprehending the text.”
However, in our primary settings over the last two years, we have gone even further to embed this crucial aspect of reading development into our practice.
Recommendation 6: Diagnostic assessment can be used to inform professional judgement about the best next steps.
The EEF guidance report makes clear that diagnostic assessment should differentiate between areas of reading need, such as phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This message is also central to the DfE sponsored Unlocking Reading CPD.
“Ultimately, therefore, all assessments are used to support decisions – the key idea is that a decision made with the information from the assessment is better than the decision that could be made without such information.”
We strive to do our very best to mirror and enact this in our work at Unity Schools Partnership, through our clear approach to the assessment of reading, which includes:
a readiness for reading assessment as part of our Reception baseline
ongoing code-knowledge and blending checks as part of our phonics programme
regular oral reading fluency checks for Years 2 – 6
a suite of curriculum-aligned comprehension assessments
As Dylan Wiliam sets out, our assessments should be used to inform decision making – not just to narrate progress or attainment. Over the last two years, we have found a much stronger correlation between pupils’ oral reading fluency in the autumn term of Years 3, 4 and 5 and their outcomes in the end of Key Stage 2 SATs assessments. This has led us to reduce the number of comprehension assessments that we deliver in an academic year by a third, in favour of prioritising oral reading fluency assessments and using this data really well to target support where it is most needed.
By adopting the EEF’s approach to diagnostic assessment as a gateway to targeted reading intervention, we have been able to make better decisions about how we prioritise resource to those who most need it, resulting in a year-on-year improvement in our Key Stage 2 reading outcomes.
