Reading Strategy & Assessment:

ELEMENTS OF FLUENCY

• Automaticity
• Accurate, fast word recognition
• A brief test for automaticity:
• Select a reading passage of 50 -250 words.
• Ask the student to read it outloud.
• Begin timing (watch/stopwatch) when the student reads the first word and stop timimg when the student reads the last word.
• If the reading has taken several minutes, convert the minutes into number of seconds.  Then add the number of additional seconds used.
• Multiply the total number of words in the passage by 60, then divide this number by the student's reading time in seconds.

Example

The student read a 250-word passage in 3 minutes and 23 seconds.
3 minutes x 60 seconds each = 180 seconds
180 + the remaining 23 seconds = 203 seconds
(250 number of words x 60) ÷ 203 seconds = @ 74 words per minute