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Ep. 153: Science of Reading Beyond Phonics: Fluency Instruction and Assessment with Jan Hasbrouck

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Today we talk about fluency and assessment with Jan Hasbrouck. She shares tips and tricks for how to to best assess and teach fluency. She also debunks frequent fluency misunderstandings and explains the scientific evidence that underlies the Hasbrouck-Tindal Oral Reading Fluency Chart.  

Note: During the podcast, we mentioned we would link Jan’s previous studies on ORF. But… we want to make sure the most recent information (Fluency Norms Chart 2017 Update) is the one that is prioritized for instructional use, so we’ve linked that to avoid confusion. 

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Lori:

You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today we'll be talking to Jan Hasbrouck about fluency, one of our favorite topics. Jan is a researcher and author who developed the Hasbrouck-Tindal oral reading fluency chart. We will debunk some myths about fluency, discuss types of fluency assessments, share what effective fluency instruction should entail, and so much more. You'll be able to apply the learning from this podcast in your classroom, school, or district tomorrow.

Welcome, teacher friend. I'm Lori.

Melissa:

And I'm Melissa.

Lori:

We are two literacy educators in Baltimore. We want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy, literacy podcast. Today we are excited because we're talking about one of our favorite topics, fluency. We are going to dig into all things fluency with a fabulous guest.

Melissa:

Yeah. Today we have Jan Hasbrouck, who is a leading researcher, educational consultant, author, and she works with schools in the United States and internationally. And like you said, Lori, we get to talk to her about one of my favorite topics, fluency, and one of, I would say one of her areas of expertise. So, super excited. Jan, thank you for being here.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I'm really happy to be here and happy to have a discussion. Also, one of my favorite topics in reading, fluency.

Lori:

Well, we would love to hear more, Jan, about what led you to study fluency so deeply. Can you tell us about that?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. I think, I was a reading teacher. I was a reading specialist for a number of years, and that led into some work as a reading coach. But while I was doing that work, and lucky for me, my training was, what we would call my original training, my teacher education, undergraduate training was very aligned with what we would today call the science of reading. And this was many decades ago.

Melissa:

You're lucky.

Jan Hasbrouck:

That I ended up... Yeah. Oh, I know, I am. Because I do hear the stories from so many about the need to unlearn and being so angry about what they didn't learn in college. And of course, nobody learns everything in college, but you can get started on the right path, and I was started on the right path. So I really felt like I did have a good toolkit. I taught always with systematic explicit phonics, and I knew the importance of making sure students were comprehending, not just decoding.

But with all of that, and after many years, by the time I became a reading coach, I had 15 years of work as a reading specialist, there were still those students who could read words and understand the words pretty well, but something was missing. They just... We didn't really, back then, have words to really describe this. The whole topic of fluency was just beginning to be addressed, and more theoretically at that time. But there were some people doing some work at it.

And so, right around that time when I became a reading coach specifically, I found right away, like day one, which will resonate with anybody who becomes a reading coach, that it's a really challenging job, and it's really different than being a reading specialist, and I wanted to get some help if I could. How do I do this reading coach job?

So I ended up back at the University of Oregon. I still lived in that area and taught in that area. And I ended up taking a course from Jerry Tindal, who was a brand new professor at that time at the University of Oregon. He had just arrived from the University of Minnesota, where he had been working along with a lot of his colleagues that are really famous to this day. It was quite a group of people, Lynn Fuchs and Doug Fuchs and Mark Shin and others who had studied with Stan Dino. And that whole group had essentially invented this measure called oral reading fluency. What they had invented with this was a whole suite of assessments called curriculum-based measures, one of which was oral reading fluency.

And so, Jerry was really excited about all this stuff and he wanted to be sure, and he really felt, and he was right, that as reading coaches, having assessment tools as part of our toolkit would be help us be better coaches. Of course, that's not all, but it was helpful and it added to the toolkit of good instructional practices that I had. And it really started me thinking about fluency, that, oh, that's what we're talking about. My kids read, but they don't read with fluency.

And then, I now had this little measure of 60 seconds, I could check their words correct per minute. And Jerry was convinced. Now, this was early, early on, so there wasn't decades of evidence that we have now, but he was sure, and he was right, but he was sure that this ORF measure was going to be... I mean, it had been proven to be reliable and valid. We had that kind of evidence. You could go out and use it and trust the results, but what did it really tell you? They were still kind of hypothesizing at that point that it could tell you today, based on those scores, how kids were going to be doing in the future. And an ORF measure could also predict or serve as an indicator of their comprehension, which was just mind boggling-to me. I was very, very skeptical of that claim. But what are we now, 30-some years later, they were right. Jerry was right.

So that really started me, and it also started me on the work that I have done around assessing fluency, because back then, and this was my, I first took a course from him in 1985. Back then, ORF was used, there were no commercially available products. There was no DIBELS, there was no Aimsweb, there was no EasyCBM. Those hadn't been created. The idea was that teachers would create their own assessments from their own curriculum. That's why it was called curriculum-based. Just go to your storage closet and pull out some books and use those to assess your students.

And they also had no norms. The guidance at that time in 1985, and for several years afterwards, was create your own norms, assess all the kids in your school, and then use an Excel spreadsheet or something to create percentiles, which is not a statistically sophisticated thing to do. But then you could see kids should be there. You can see what the average is, and you could see where kids could be.

And I remember hearing that, and remember, I'm sitting there as a highly experienced reading specialist with 15 years experience, a master's degree from the University of Oregon. And when he said that, I raised my hand and said, "That doesn't make any sense to me, that you would rely on school-based norms." And I said, "The reason it doesn't make sense to me is because for the last 15 years as a Title I reading teacher, I've only worked in high-poverty schools, where the average of those schools is not going to be optimal. You can't convince me that that's what we should be aiming for. So how do we know what to aim for?"

And he said, "Well, what do you think we should do?" And I said, "Well, somebody needs to create national norms." And being a great professor, he said to his student, "That's a good idea. You should do that." So I did. With his help, we created, we did a first study, which was just a few thousand kids for some... Not a whole lot of people were doing the assessment, so we didn't have a lot of data. And that was published and got lots of attention, because it was the first fluency norms that ever existed. Then we repeated that study in 2006 and...

Lori:

Oh, sorry. Do you remember what year?

Jan Hasbrouck:

1992 is when it got published.

Lori:

Okay, 1992. We're going to link that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, it got published in 1992. But there... Okay, well, there's a story there, Lori. A fact too, just a little behind the scenes fact, is that it got published in 1992, but we submitted it in the late '80s, somewhere around 1989 or something. We submitted this little study to many different journals and nobody would publish it.

They sent back these letters. I mean, every author, every researcher sends things out and they get rejected. But those rejection letters were really quite brutal. They essentially said, "What the heck are you guys thinking? Why are you assessing children with one-minute measures? What is this going to tell you? Why should we... Who cares? This is stupid." It was like, "Not only are we not going to publish this, you shouldn't be doing this."

Lori:

Wow!

Jan Hasbrouck:

And so, we just kept trying different journals and we finally got the attention of a little teacher journal, not a research journal, and it was special education. It was a CEC, Council of Exceptional Children publication called Teaching Exceptional Children. And it was not a research journal, just a teacher magazine about things to do with your children with disabilities. And they saw the value of it and they published it. And even though it was sort of hidden away there, and this is pre-internet and everything, people started noticing it because people started using this ORF assessment, and like me, they wanted some norms that were not just school norms.

It was just a few thousand students, and it only was second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. That's all the data we had. So that's why in 2006, we did a much bigger study. By that time, people were asking us, replicate that study. We need first grade norms, we need older kid norms. And so, we did that study that was then published, again, not in a research journal. We specifically asked the Reading Teacher to publish it, the publication of then the International Reading Association, now the International Literacy Association. But we reached out to those editors and said, "Would you like to publish it?" Because again, early stages of the internet, if you want to get something out there in the hands of reading teachers, that's why we went with the Reading Teacher.

And then, we just recently, a couple of years ago, a few years ago now at this point, replicated the study again one more time. So the first study was, I think, about 15,000 students, the second one was a quarter of a million students, and this last one was slightly over 6 million students.

Melissa:

Oh, wow.

Lori:

Wow.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah. So we've done a lot in that area, and I feel very good about the contribution that we made through that work, because Jerry was right that it was a valuable assessment. I was right that we needed national norms. And those national norms have been very helpful. I know they're used around the world in English-speaking countries. And they play a different role now because in this, now we're in the 2020s, we do have all those commercially available assessments, DIBELS and Aimsweb and EasyCBM and FastBridge and all those. And they have their own norms. So if you're using those assessments, they have norms available to you.

But sometimes you want to assess outside of those products. You may want to just go to your closet and pull out a grade level text, and you can use our norms for that, and you can use our norms as a sort of secondary confirmation about the results you're getting from those commercially available assessments. So that's a long answer, Lori, to your question about how I got started, but that's how I got started and what became of me getting started in this area.

Melissa:

Oh, I love it. I'll tell you a quick story, Jan. We did a whole project in Baltimore around middle school and high school students who were several grade levels below in reading coming into those grade levels, and we were doing improvement science, so we were really looking at what are all the things we can really dig into? And we spent a lot of time looking at all, there's a million causes and different things, but we really landed on fluency as the place to focus because you could assess it so quickly, so easily, and make improvements pretty quickly that had such an impact. But even, I mean, the assessment was where we really focused, because we said, you can find out so much in that one minute. I mean, it's so quick, but there's so much information. And I also just think it's funny because we used those tables, the Hasbrouck and Tindal tables, and we didn't even know that there were people behind those names at that time. So, I love hearing the story of how it came to be, because we're very familiar with them.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, they were... Yeah, Jan and Jerry having an argument. That's how it all started.

Melissa:

I love it.

Lori:

Jan, Do you think that you could share a little bit about types of fluency assessments that we can do, and what texts we can use to assess fluency? I know there's a lot of teachers listening who are thinking, this sounds great. It sounds like a really quick, informative assessment that, I mean, you could do your whole class in under 30 minutes, right? So, what text would I use if I wanted to do this and I was a teacher, and what kinds of assessments would I do?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Okay, yeah, I'd be happy to talk about that. And first, I want to get a little nerdy and geeky before we go on, because other people may have heard me talk about the fact that I'm always cautious about trying to be very accurate about what we're actually measuring. I and many other people who study this area carefully feel bad that assessment of words correct per minute was actually named oral reading fluency, because it confuses things a bit.

Accuracy and rate are two components of fluency, and they're often used as indicators of fluency. But in the reading world, we really should be thinking about fluency as a little bit more complex construct, more like the way that the National Reading Panel described fluency as being comprised of accuracy, yes, and rate, yes, but also expression. And when we are thinking about the true aspect, we don't want to call it a skill, because fluency is not a skill, it is the outcome. It's the representation of skillful reading from both aspects of the simple view, both aspects of Scarborough's rope.

In order to be a fluent reading, you have to have language, you have to have word recognition skills, and you have to weave those all together. And we, in the reading community, who really understand reading, would call fluency accuracy, text read with a reasonable accuracy, appropriate rate and suitable expression or prosody that represents that you understand what you've read. So, I wish that words correct per minute had not been called oral reading fluency. It is oral, it is reading, and it has some aspects of fluency, but to...

So, what I love about this little measure that I discovered way back when, this words correct per minute, is that it is so powerful. It is so short. It does tell us so much. You're absolutely right, and we should continue to use it even though it doesn't fully measure fluency.

So, when I talk about measuring fluency, I talk about two different things. What words correct per minute, what we call ORF, oral reading fluency, really is a measure of, more precisely, automaticity. Automaticity is purely accuracy and rate together, and it's critically important to skillful reading. You don't have to worry about prosody. I mean, you do have to worry about prosody at some point, but when you're just measuring, can this kid read text, automaticity is the easiest thing to check, and we can. We have reliability, validity, we have norms. And how do you do that? Well, you can, of course, use any of those commercially available products. They all come from that original research base, but they have their own individual bells and whistles. So, that's one way to do it.

The other way is to do what the originators of those assessments thought would be appropriate, is to go get a book that represents your student's grade level curriculum, and that could be narrative text, it could be library books, it could be social studies, it could be a science textbook, and pull a piece of text from that that doesn't have any tricks to it. I mean, you wouldn't pick a piece of science text where they're introducing some brand new concepts or new vocabulary, or social studies, or you wouldn't use narrative text that's poetry or has lots and lots of dialogue, because we read those things differently. So, you want a passage that doesn't have a lot of odd or trick words, or doesn't have a lot of conventions that would make a reader, a good reader, slow down or something.

But you can pick that a piece of text that you think represents the skill level and vocabulary, et cetera of your school, your class. And one way to test whether it's an appropriate passage is to have some of your best readers read it, have some of your on-level readers read it first, to see if it really is something that they can handle. Then you can feel pretty good about the fact that it will distinguish, identify your struggling readers.

So, it can be done very, very informally, but the process behind it has decades of science, and that science is that there is a scoring system. You score every single error. You only time for one minute. You assess, you count every error, every single time, so if there's one word the kid keeps missing, you count that. You count words that are transposed as two errors. You count every omitted word. You don't count insertions, because what you're counting is the number of words on the page that they read correctly, correctly. So, there's rationale in science behind doing it that way.

And we do one minute. We don't... Part of the science also, that I see kind of thrown out the window sometimes, is that to follow the evidence-based, research-based protocol, you cannot either encourage children to read fast or allow them to speed read. It has to be representation of their best reading. So when I'm assessing a student, as I did yesterday, who I say, "When you're ready," because you never, you're also not supposed to say "Ready, go," and start your stopwatch. You're supposed to say something like, "When you're ready, start reading," and then you surreptitiously start your timer, but you don't say, yeah, "Ready, go."

And if a student does start reading, just like we've all heard that... Then you stop them. And what I usually say when I hear that is, they're trying to impress me, so I want them to know, you impressed me. Like, "Wow! Woo, honey, you read really fast. That was fast reading. So now I know you can read fast, but that's not what this is about. What I want you to do is read well. I want you to do your best reading. Make it sound like you're talking." Something like that. And for most kids, they will slow down and give me much more appropriate sample of their reading. And that's kind of been lost in the interpretation, I think, because whenever we have a stopwatch, I think most of us think that the whole point is to get as fast as possible, and that's not true. And we know that now. We know that.

Melissa:

As a middle school teacher...

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, we, yeah...

Melissa:

And I didn't know what to do, what you just said to do, right? So I just had super competitive middle school students who were like, "I'm going to get more words per minute than the person next to me." And I didn't have the language to say what you just said too, right? Like, what are we really looking for here? And it was hard to get them out of that mindset, so I'm so glad that you shared that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, and especially for those kids, those middle school kids who are so darn competitive. Sometimes if I have the time, I'll let them do that. "Do you want to see how fast you can read? Okay, let's do it." And for that I might just do 30 seconds and then double it. Just like, "See how fast you can read for 30 seconds. Go!" And let them do that, and then say, "Okay, now that's done. Now you read fast. Now I want you to read well."

Melissa:

I like that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Because that's what those norms are all about too. If you allow or encourage speed reading, those norms are not useful, because you broke the protocol, you didn't follow the scientific procedures.

So, that's the way, generically, that we can assess automaticity, words correct per minute. We can also assess fuller fluency, which is what I did yesterday too, by having them read texts that you're not really timing. I mean, I'm always timing in the background, because it gives me, did it take you six minutes to read this passage or three minutes to read this passage? I just kind of want to know that. It helps give me some other data.

But what I'm listening for in a true fluency assessment is, along with accuracy and rate, I'm going to listen for expression. And the little kid I was assessing yesterday, expression is not there. He's a sixth-grader who reads at about the third grade level, and he's struggling, and he doesn't read with sufficient automaticity to allow prosit to happen. And that was really quite clear, honestly, in the one-minute assessment, but I wanted him to read more so I could check his stamina, how well a kid can read for a minute. And for him, this was true, his one-minute was on a third grade passage, was quite fine, but he slowed down and started making more errors, which is very typical of our vulnerable, striving readers. He just doesn't have stamina.

So, those are two ways to be thinking about this. The full-blown, multi-dimensional fluency, which includes prosody, and always a check of comprehension, because you want to just, at least informally, are you paying attention to what you're reading? Are you getting the gist of this? But alongside that wonderful words correct per minute, automaticity measure should always be used.

Melissa:

Jan, really quickly, a question for the expression and prosody. I'm sure, I mean, sometimes you can just kind of tell, right? But is there anything more formal for the expression and prosody, in terms of an assessment that you would recommend for what teachers should be looking for in someone that is doing well with that, versus they're not?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Right. Well, at the end of the day, the only technology, so to speak, that we have for that is our impression. But there are some scales, some rating scales. Tim Rasinski has a really good one, which generously he makes available for free. You can just go on the internet and look for Tim Rasinski. I think it's expression, I think he calls it an expression rating, and I think it's a six- or seven-point scale. And it just gives you some guidelines, slow, hesitating, or fluid, mirrors spoken language, kind of thing. It just would give a teacher a little bit of a guidance.

There's, the NAEP fluency scale has four categories, which is kind of easier to use, because really, what's the difference between those really quite good or really not very good prosody? And at the end of the day, that's all we're really saying. You have a lot to learn about prosody, or you're just fine with your prosody. It's not something that's very nuanced.

I do know that someday, and it may be soon, there are researchers working on prosody scales that would be connected to voice recognition software. So children will read into software, which is available now. There are lots of ways to have children read into a microphone, and artificial intelligence scores words correct per minute quite accurately, but it doesn't yet scale prosody or expression. But it will at some point. It will. If we can create ChatGPT...

Melissa:

We can do this.

Jan Hasbrouck:

We can do this, yeah. And there are researchers working on that.

Melissa:

That is so cool. I am wondering, another question I have, because I see this question come up a lot around your tables, your and Jerry's tables, that I think we have in our minds as teachers a lot of the times that we want to get to a hundred percent, right? Just like the competitive middle schoolers. And I know that was kind of eye-opening for the teachers I worked with in Baltimore too, was like, where on this scale do we want to get to? Where on this table, what percentiles do we want to actually hit? What matters? So I'd love to hear from you, because you know. So we'd just love to hear what you have to say about that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, I'm happy to answer that question and really grateful to have the chance to answer that question, because it is confusing, because in almost all measures that we as teachers use, or human beings use, we want higher. Higher is always better in almost everything. IQ, higher is better. Looking at your bank account, higher is better. We want... Or sometimes lower, on the scale, we're trying to lose weight or whatever. But it's the, we want to go as high as possible or as low as possible depending, in almost every measure, but not every measure.

There are some me areas of human measurement where we would all agree that we absolutely want to be average, and there's only a few, but there are some, and we can all wrap our heads around this. One of them, the obvious one is body temperature.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's a good example.

Jan Hasbrouck:

We strive to be average in body temperature. It is not good to be high, high, high. It's not good to be low. I say, "Oh, good, you got your body temperature down to 64. You're dead, but you have a nice low body temperature." In body temperature, average is not just acceptable, it's perfect. And there's some others. It's like, blood pressure. Average is perfect. We don't want high, we don't want super low. BMI, body mass index. We want average. Average is optimal.

And the thing about that is, this automaticity thing, this words correct per minute, is really sort of a bodily function, in a way. It's representative of how our brain processes text, and it is in some ways a biological function. It is a physical manifestation of both how fast can we talk and how fast can our brain, an organ, process this information? So this is one of the cases, oral reading fluency is where average is not just acceptable, it's actually perfect.

It's always been fairly clear. I mean, we've not been concerned that below average is a concern on words correct per a minute. Of course it is. But up at the top, that's not optimal, and it can even be bad. And those of us who have been around long enough all know that, that those middle school kids who are race reading, at the end when you say, "So tell me about that paragraph or that page."

Melissa:

No idea.

Jan Hasbrouck:

"Oh, I have no idea what I just read." Yes. So I've known that for a very long time, and for a long time, because our studies were simply descriptive studies, we simply said, here's a quarter of a million students at different grade levels, and here's how they read. So we didn't say, we didn't do any tests to say what is optimal. So just using my many years of experience as a reading specialist, I knew that it was somewhere around the 50th percentile. It was very clear that you didn't have to be very far below the 50th percentile, where comprehension was going to be limited and motivation started to fall off and all kinds of things.

And we also, I just found that I didn't see a whole lot of benefit to reading above the 50th percentile. I wasn't convinced that that was optimal. Although I will say, I've worked with Tim Shanahan for a number of, over 20 years now, on different projects, and we were often presenting at places at together, or he would present and I would present. So I've heard him present many times, he's heard me present many times, and he said a long time ago that he really felt that I was right about the 50th percentile, but that there probably was some benefit to slightly above the 50th percentile, perhaps up to the 75th. So he said he thought the range should be 50th to 75th percentile. And I thought, well, okay, you're Tim Shanahan and a you know lot, but I think the 50th percentile is just fine.

Well, lo and behold, in 2021, just two years ago now, a brilliant study came out. White et all did a study of NAEP, using NAEP data. And NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a highly regarded, well regarded assessment of essentially comprehension. But what they wanted to know was, how does fluency interact with these comprehension scores?

So they went back and took kids from, I think it was the 2018 fourth grade assessment, so it was pre-pandemic, and they took those scores of the kids that, in the NAEP, it ranks kids in terms of their comprehension as advanced, proficient, basic, below basic. And then these researchers went and found those students' words correct per minute scores, which is part of the database, but has not been correlated before, and what they found was a pretty darn amazing.

The kids who were at the advanced level, the highest you can get in fourth grade, matched almost exactly to the Hasbrouck and Tindal 75th percentile.

Melissa:

Oh, wow.

Jan Hasbrouck:

The kids who were proficient, good and above basic were at the 50th percentile, or slightly above the Hasbrouck contend end of grade four 50th percentile. The kids who were below basic were below the 50th percentile. So Tim Shanahan was right, is that there does seem to be a little bit of a boost in terms of the potential. Fluency, of course, only makes comprehension a potential. It doesn't guarantee. But those children who can read proficiently, with sufficient automaticity to be close to the 75th percentile, they have optimal comprehension.

But it does prove that there's no value, that we have no evidence of any value of being above the 75th percentile. In our norms, there are kids at the 99th percentile. There are those kids who just read really fast. Are they good comprehenders? Probably not. We don't know for sure. But the best data we have would indicate, to answer your question, that it's optimal for students... It's optimal for help us to help students read so well that they can read between the 50th and 75th percentiles. We don't want to help them read fast to get there. We want them to read well to get there.

But for some students, when we think about Scarborough's rope, they have in fact reasonably mastered all those component skills. It's just, they don't read with sufficient rate. And there are those kids that we can just zero in on a fluency intervention. But I find most students, although we can be working on fluency as a targeted outcome, most of those kids benefit from some skill work. They've got some language to continue. That's my issue to develop.

Lori:

I'm so glad that you shared that story. That was really helpful.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Good. I'm glad. It was helpful for me to come up with that too, because why would we go around saying the 50th percentile is adequate? It just doesn't make any sense. But when we connect words correct per minute to body temperature, that's...

Lori:

Really helpful, yeah.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I think for me, yeah. So that's why I think of it too, it's an analogy that works in terms of speed too, because just like body temperature, it's a hugely important piece of information, but we can collect that in just seconds nowadays. And the same with words correct per minute. We don't need a long, involved... We can quickly get that information. And in both cases, we want you to be about average. And if you're not, if you're below, I mean, for a fever, it's above. For words correct per minute, it's below. But if you're not at benchmark, something's wrong, but we don't know. Just like a fever, we don't know what's wrong. A fever means something's wrong inside your body, but we don't know what. Words correct per minute, if you're below the 50th percentile, something's wrong with your reading, but it doesn't tell us what. It's not diagnostic.

Lori:

That's super helpful to think about too, in that way. Jan, are there any other misunderstandings that people have about fluency? It seems like this assessment is a tricky, or a sticky point. Are there any others that folks have?

Jan Hasbrouck:

It is. Well, I think we've addressed two of the big ones. When people say, how can you measure fluency in 60 seconds? I say, well, you really can't. Even though the assessment is called oral reading fluency, to truly measure fluency, which is a complex construct, you should probably, well, you need to listen prosody, or expression. And I like to have kids read a little bit more than just 60 seconds, so there's that misunderstanding, which is actually kind of correct. We're not really measuring fluency.

Another one I hear people say is the one that Melissa raised, that faster is better, and no, it's not. I would say the last one I hear the most is people's annoyance or distrust of words correct per minute. When I hear them say, it's ridiculous to be using that super short little measure because what we really should be measuring is comprehension. And I always say to them, yeah, you are absolutely right, that you're part right. But you're absolutely right that the important thing is comprehension. The reason we teach reading, the reason we read, it's always, to say it just as simply as possible, it's about comprehension.

So yes, that is the most important thing. The problem is though, if you really understand it, you know that measuring comprehension is really incredibly complex because comprehension is the most incredibly complex thing, the aspect about reading. Fluency itself is somewhat complex, but nothing like comprehension. So we have figured out, researchers have figured out how to come up with measures of comprehension that we can all trust, but because comprehension is so complex, those measures are certainly not a one-minute measure, and they're certainly not a 10-minute measure.

To really measure somebody's comprehension, are you or are you not a good comprehender in the full-blown meaning of that word, you need an hour or two hours to measure. You need different types of texts under different conditions, reading silently, reading orally, previewing, not previewing, narrative text, expository text, all those kinds of things to be able to say, "Yeah, you have a problem with comprehension, or not."

So yes, it's important. It's really, really complex to measure accurately. And that's a whole other discussion too, where I hear teachers who have been mistakenly trained to believe that reading a passage and answering some questions is a measure of comprehension. It's not. I mean, we do it because it's a way to peek inside their head. But what does it tell you if a child reads a passage and then when you say, "Can you answer these questions?" And they say, "I don't know what the answer is." Is that a comprehension problem?

Melissa:

We don't know.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Or is it a problem that they couldn't read the words well enough, or they read the words well enough but they didn't have background knowledge or vocabulary, or they have attention deficit disorder and they couldn't pay attention long enough? Those are not comprehension problems. Or, I mean, this is the real world. Melissa, you work with middle school kids, you know this. They just didn't want to answer your stupid question.

Melissa:

Right.

Jan Hasbrouck:

It's just easier to say, "I don't know." Okay, comprehension problem. Maybe not. Maybe a attitude problem, or whatever, a motivation question.

Melissa:

Just a bad day.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Or just a bad day, exactly. So yes, we can measure comprehension. No, ORF doesn't measure comprehension, but a-ha, if you look, and you don't have to look very hard, you can lightly look at the last 40 years of research that has been done around ORF. ORF is one of the, words correct per minute is one of the best indicators of true comprehension that we have, aside from those two hour tests that school psychologists give. We can get a peak. It's not perfect. It's like a thermometer. Thermometers don't diagnose broken legs or some other things, but they tell us a lot.

ORF tells us a lot, and it does tell us quite a bit about comprehension, as an indicator only. Your comprehension's probably fine. If you can read at the 50th to 75th percentile and grade level text, probably your comprehension is fine. Not guaranteed, but probably. And if you're below the 50th percentile, you're probably struggling with comprehension, maybe mostly because you can't read the words very well. But we do need to think about comprehension. We should always be thinking about comprehension, but we should be sophisticated as professionals about what comprehension really means and own up to the fact that it's really, really difficult to truly measure it.

Melissa:

And we could probably just keep talking about assessment, but I do want to ask you too about instruction before we run out of time with you. So I'm just thinking about, I guess it doesn't even have to be students who are below that 50th percentile, but I mean, I think that's where you would focus in on if they are below the 50th percentile. What can teachers do to help students improve their fluency?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, I'm glad we're spending some time with that, because it's not just about the assessments and then, okay, we're done. You're low fluency.

Melissa:

Try again next time.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, right. There are some things we can do, but take a deep breath here. It is proven to be, fluency has been proven to be one of the most intractable aspects of reading, the hardest to influence. If students are really struggling with fluency and all the other things are in place, just getting them to be more fluent. And that is a descriptor, unfortunately, I guess, for a lot of students with dyslexia, that if they really do have the neurobiological challenges that dyslexia can bring, one of the characteristics of that not only is difficulty being aware and processing phonemes, which leads to difficulty in reading words. Those two things we can actually address quite easily, especially if we start early and do age-appropriate, targeted, systematic, explicit instruction, we can help those kids rewire their brains so that even though they may have dyslexia, they can become phonemically aware and then use that to learn how to decode words, and that's great.

But one of the things we found for those, especially moderately and severely dyslexic kids, that even if we start early, even if they become pretty good word readers, and even if they, and they often do have very strong language. Even though they have all those things in place, becoming truly fluent in their reading can often be difficult. It's an area we still have a lot of work to do to figure out exactly why.

But it has to do, I'm sure, with aspects of the brain. How malleable is the brain? How much can we, through instruction and practice, really change the brain? We know we can change it a lot in terms of word recognition and decoding and language vocabulary. We can do a lot to the brain, but can we make it faster? We can try, but there seems to be some limits in what we can do. But for your garden variety neurotypical kid, we do have, and even with our students with dyslexia, we should keep trying to see if we can speed that up a little bit.

So the first thing though is always, before we talk about this, is to once again say that fluency is an outcome of skill mastery and skill development. In the simple view of reading Scarborough's rope, you must have that language. You must have the word recognition skills in order to eventually become fluent. So just a low score, and this is, Lori, I guess this would be another answer to your question about what's the misinterpretation of oral reading fluency, or words correct per minute. That a low ORF score means you have a fluency problem. That's a misinterpretation I hear all the time, and leading to a low ORF score, you should be having a fluency intervention.

Yes, probably, and... is what I would say. It can be really good to help our students, no matter where they are, to continue to work on reading text with increasing accuracy and appropriate rate. But if, like this child, delightful child, I assessed yesterday, who's a sixth-grader who's kind of struggling around the third grade level, if I just designed an intervention on fluency for him, I would be doing him a disservice, if I think of fluency as rate. He is stuck at the third grade level, rather than the sixth grade level, because of word recognition issues. He's stuck at instantaneous recognition of simple words, and he has no skills, basically, to read multi-syllable words.

So an intervention that we will be designing for him will be multi-pronged, and it will include, continue to work on his fluency at the level that he's currently reading, but we will also do intervention around what's keeping him there, which is word recognition. So it'll be, for him, it will be some decoding and encoding work, because a lot of kids, most kids, if they're stuck on one, they're stuck on both, and intervening with decoding and encoding at the same time is beneficial. Then working on that, so that's helping lay that foundation of fluency, which is accuracy, and then continuing to work on rate.

And we can work on rate at the word level. So if we are working on learning to decode more complex words, we can work on that accuracy, but we can also do some rate work around that. Okay, now you've decoded all these words. You're getting better at decoding these words. Now let's try to read just this word, this word list, or this probe that has just words on it. Work on increasing your rate on that. And then we can do some phrase work, and we can do some passage work of rereading. Take this passage, make sure you're reading it accurately first, build that accuracy, then work on the rate, move toward automaticity, always being mindful of comprehension, because once we get into text, it's not about just reading the words anymore. It's about reading and thinking about the words. So, a good intervention should never disconnect word reading with comprehension.

But those are the aspects of intervention that I would do with a student, which if a student has a low ORF score, their words correct per minute is below benchmark, that for me would trigger some further diagnostic assessment, and then I would use those results to plan the intervention, which would likely include some work on fluency, but also the causal factors of why they're struggling with fluency.

Melissa:

Would you ever do any intervention around the prosody or expression?

Jan Hasbrouck:

I weave that into interventions, but I've never specifically come up with a student or encountered a student for whom that's the only problem. If they are reading really monotone or chunking incorrectly, what I find is simply pointing that out to them, mirroring to them how they're reading, and saying, "Does that sound like the way we talk?" And then modeling what I think is better. And I explain to them, I always like to explain to kids why we're doing, why would we do that? Why is it important to read like We talk?

Good question. The answer is because we understand what we hear people say. Our brains have been wired for millennia to understand spoken language. This newfangled thing called print, we're trying to train our brains to understand print, but it's not automatic. But the whole purpose of print is comprehension, so we can help our brains comprehend text if we make it sound more like speech, because we were born with the ability to understand speech. So I have a little explanation for that that's appropriate for kindergartners and first graders and middle school kids, so we spend some time talking about that.

So the prosody part of it is usually, I have found, in my 50-some years of experience now, to be always sort of a secondary issue. And usually, with some work for some kids, especially English learners, for whom this whole language... They have language, but it's not the one they're trying to read in, that working with them more with the modeling, recording them, pointing out, having them practice several times with the model, that that's usually sufficient.

Lori:

Jan, is the way you just explained it to us the way that you would explain it to children?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, yes, just age appropriate, complex, how long the sentence is and everything. But it's all about understanding. I do remember talking to kindergartners about this. And we start at the word level. We figure out how to decode the word mom. Like, whoa, we just read that word. We read, mom. What's a mom? Who's your mom? What do you know about moms? Or maybe easier to do something more concrete, like dog. We just decoded a word, dog. Whoa. That word has meaning. What does it mean? Do you know a dog? What dogs look like? We could spend some time talking about it, and we're developing that connection to comprehension.

And then I let them know that, yeah, that your brain knows that word, and now you can say a word and you can read it and you can spell it, and it's all about understanding. And then when we get to the phrase level, it's the same thing. As soon as they get to text, Lori, that has the potential for prosody, "The dog is big." "This dog is big!" Oh, there's an exclamation part. Okay, let's reread that like we would say, would we say. So that means, an exclamation means we get excited about it. It's important. "This dog is big!" That tells you a lot more than "This dog is big." And yeah, those kind of conversations about, make it sound like you talk so that your brain understands it. You want your brain to understand it. Yeah. I watch my kindergarten get... Yeah, that's right. Get that brain working.

Lori:

That's so fun. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with listeners? Anything we didn't get to that you're just feeling like you want everybody to hear or know?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Oh, you know teachers pretty well, I think, the two of you, and you've asked the kind of questions that I mostly get from teachers when I'm working with them. I think I would just leave, because I may have been saying some things that are somewhat, people might interpret as being dismissive of ORF, that it is a strange little measure of 60 seconds, and it doesn't tell you everything, and it doesn't measure comprehension. But it is a very important piece, tool in our toolkit. Every reading teacher, every classroom teacher, really, because it is such an easy to learn kind of assessment, should know how to use an ORF, and why to use an ORF, and what it means, along with all the other wonderful assessment tools and instructional tools that we use. But yeah, I embrace it. I think of it as if I were a physician, it would be my thermometer. It's the quick little check that I can always do with students, and it tells me so much.

Melissa:

I love that. I'm going to take that and use it. I appreciate it. Jan, before we leave, do you have a minute or two for some fun questions?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Sure.

Melissa:

These are just really quick, whatever comes to your head questions. No pressure.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Okay.

Melissa:

All right, so we have four questions, and we'll start off. What do you love to read?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, I am truly a geeky social scientist around this area of reading. I love to read, and I read almost every day, some kind of article about reading assessment or reading instruction. I do. It feeds my soul, because there's so much more to learn, and it is so complex. For fun, I give myself some time most evenings to read the New Yorker magazine, because it has such excellent writing of all different kinds. Every week, it comes with some wonderful narrative pieces, non-fiction pieces. It has lots of articles about things I might never have been interested in, but there it is, and it's really well written, so I'll read about something. So the New Yorker is my entertainment. I don't have a whole lot of time to devote these days to more novels or that kind of thing, but I don't know that I ever will be. I'm too hooked on the science stuff that I find very interesting.

Melissa:

All right. What do you love to watch?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Ooh, I love to watch all kinds of things. I think, I can't wait for the next season of Ted Lasso to come out. That was so heartwarming and wonderful.

Melissa:

I talked Lori into watching that one.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Just so good. Yeah, I had to kind of be talked into it too. But yeah, it was so popular for good reasons. Cleverly written and heartwarming. But last night I watched a Netflix documentary on Netflix, a documentary on Alexei Navalny, who's the dissident, Russian dissident who's imprisoned in Russia right now. So I like, just like I like the geeky stuff about reading, I like documentaries too, to learn more about the world and what's happening out in the world. That was highly recommended. It was Oscar-nominated and I can see why.

Melissa:

What do you love to listen to?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Podcasts. I love to listen to Melissa and Lori and learn from my colleagues. I love to listen. I'm also an NPR geek. I have it going on in the background all the time. I like news and facts and updates and intriguing discussions about aspects of life. Currently, there's lots of discussion about adolescent depression and the challenges that our adolescents are... And I like to listen to music in the background. I like everything. I was raised in the era of the Beatles and that rock and roll. I like that. I like jazz. I like classical music. So I have something going on in the background a lot of times.

Lori:

All right, so while you have all that stuff going on in the background, this question, why do you do what you love for literacy and for education?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah. I don't know if it's just a little bug that I have or something, but it does feel like so many of my professional colleagues, like the two of you, it does feel like a calling, so it's kind of hard to a analyze why I do it. I just know from the very beginning, when I had the opportunity to teach someone something, it really did make me feel whole, like I was contributing, that watching them learn fed my soul. It was this reciprocity. And I feel very lucky that very early on, I got particularly interested in working with the children who struggle. I find the children who really struggle with this work are the ones who need us the most, who need the most careful and precise assistance and help, and I just, working with those children and helping teachers who work with those children just makes me happy and hopeful and optimistic. And that work is a treasure, and I feel blessed to have been able to do it for all this time.

Melissa:

Well, we cannot thank you enough for being here today, sharing your knowledge. I'm sure we could have 10 more podcast episodes with you and pick your brain. But thank you so much for sharing with us today. We really are so grateful.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, thank you. Thank you both for this invitation. I enjoyed the opportunity.

Lori:

Thanks for listening, literacy lovers. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list LiteracyPodcast.com.

Melissa:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds, PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much, and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.