NAEP - Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading: Executive Summary

NAEP - Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading: Executive Summary

This new NCES report discusses findings about fourth-grade students' oral reading from a special study that was part of the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. The results suggest that the three separate components of oral reading ability (accuracy, rate, and fluency) are very much related to each other and to reading comprehension, as measured by the main NAEP assessment. "Fluent" readers in this study were likely to read higher percentages of words accurately, to read the passage at a faster rate, and to have scored higher, on average, on the NAEP reading assessment than "nonfluent" readers. More than one-half of the students read the study passage fluently, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and at a rate of at least 105 words per minute. However, a group of students whose average scale score and labored oral reading performance suggested they were struggling also demonstrated, on average, the lowest performance on measures of accuracy, rate, and fluency.