Reflection

(1) Advantages and challenges of assessing and teaching fluency

The greatest advantage to assessing fluency is that you can really see a student’s long-term
progression when it comes to how comfortable they are with reading. Measuring fluency can
be done with many different assessments at the same time. This allows for a teacher to get a
big picture of a student’s reading status at the movement and then gage growth over time.
Some challenges to doing fluency testing is that it is very time consuming. To get a good fluency
baseline for each student in the classroom takes a lot of time and one on one work within a
school day. The other challenge about fluency is that it can only really be measured by a
student reading aloud. Making it more difficult of compare before and after because there is
limited physical evidence.
(2) Your experience assessing one child’s fluency
My experience testing this one student’s fluency was something that I felt comfortable doing. I
have previously spent a year in a reading resource class where part of my role as a
paraeducator was to get benchmarks and progress reports on students reading. I found that
students would often begin reading fast because they are either in a rush to get back to class or
think they are being timed. This can affect how their fluency is presented. That might have
contributed to my student and his fast-reading pace. However, after having my student read
several different leveled books I came to the conclusion that he is just a faster paced reader.
Another thing I noticed is that even though he did not have all 4s in fluency scoring he was still
able to have great comprehension.
(3) Your thoughts on the practicality and purpose of assessing oral reading fluency
I think that assessing reading fluency is a great way to track students progress in literacy
development. I think it would be great if students could have saved audio files of their reading
aloud. That way over time teachers can hear the growth that students are making in their
reading fluency. I do however think that fluency is not the most important indicator of a good
reader. Reading aloud is something that students don’t do as often as reading on their own.