Boost reading fluency to narrow attainment gap

Monitoring reading fluency would be an ‘extremely useful’ indicator that would be ‘quick and easy’ to measure, and could help primary schools narrow attainment gaps between different groups of pupils. That’s according to new research from the FFT education data lab.

The research drew on data from the FFT Reading Assessment Programme (RAP), an online tool which assesses pupils on grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) accuracy, decoding accuracy and reading fluency. Between September 2022 and August 2024, a total of 110,000 pupils from almost 700 schools completed more than 340,000 assessments. The researchers note that the assessment of reading in England has largely focused on decoding (measured by the Year 1 phonics check) and comprehension (measured via KS1 and KS2 SATs), and that this analysis of RAP data therefore provides some of the first evidence from England about fluency across the primary school years.

RAP assessments are optional, and have fluency passages that progress in reading difficulty. Each assessment is designed for a particular year group, and most (but not all) assessments were taken by pupils for which the assessment was designed. The research measured how many words children in Year 1 to Year 6 could accurately read aloud in a passage of text in one minute. It found that fluency typically increases during Key Stages 1 and 2, from 16 words per minute in the Autumn term of Year 1 to 114 words per minute in the Summer term of Year 6. However there was consistently a ‘fluency gap’ between disadvantaged pupils and their peers, which widened to almost 15 words per minute by the end of Year 6. There was also a small gap in fluency between boys and girls, which begins to emerge at ages 10 and 11, just before the end of Key Stage 2.

Using 2024 Key Stage 2 test data supplied by around 2000 schools, the researchers then linked Year 6 pupils’ KS2 reading comprehension test results to their Year 6 RAP assessments. They found there is a reasonably strong correlation between fluency and reading comprehension. Their analysis also suggests that around half of the attainment gap in reading comprehension between girls and boys can be ‘explained’ by the former’s greater reading fluency. Similarly, around half the the comprehension attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers – which is larger than that between girls and boys – can be ‘explained’ by differences in reading fluency.

In a blog (available here: https://tinyurl.com/4x5jktvz) discussing their findings, the researchers note that the low level of reading fluency of the lowest quartile of readers is likely to indicate ‘a reading difficulty that will impact this group across the curriculum’. They suggest that monitoring the oral reading fluency of the lowest quartile of readers, and addressing this deficit as early as possible, should be a concern of government and schools alike. Fluency teaching and fluency practice throughout the school years, including a focus on oral reading fluency through repeated reading, choral reading, partner reading, and all other fluency strategies are likely to be very supportive of a pupils’ overall reading development, according to the report. The monitoring of reading fluency will be particularly useful to schools because it is ‘quick and easy’ to measure, they argue.

The research team also argue that their data is relevant to thinking about the structure of the KS2 Reading paper, and in particular its length, in that papers which are too long ‘risk becoming assessments largely of reading speed’.

Full report: https://tinyurl.com/2t3yrpt2