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Revisiting Fluency Instruction and Assessment with Jan Hasbrouck

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Episode 227

In this episode, Jan Hasbrouck discusses the critical components of reading fluency, focusing on automaticity and its measurement through words correct per minute (WCPM). The discussion highlights the relationship between fluency and comprehension, the role of oral reading fluency in assessing student progress, and the importance of frequent assessments in the classroom. Jan also reflects on recent research findings from NAEP scores that challenge previous assumptions about fluency and automaticity, emphasizing the need for educators to adapt their understanding and practices based on evolving research.  The discussion also touches on the debate between repeated reading and wide reading, advocating for an approach to reading instruction that incorporates both methods. Hasbrouck encourages educators to embrace continuous learning and adapt their teaching strategies based on evolving research.

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Lori:

Do you have students who struggle to effortlessly and accurately decode words? Understanding how students can quickly recognize words without effort is key to boosting reading fluency.

Melissa:

In today's episode, we'll talk to expert Jan Hasbrook and she'll tell us why automaticity matters, how it impacts comprehension and how you can help your students build this essential skill.

Lori:

Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori:

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa:

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, jan, welcome back to the podcast. We're so excited to talk about fluency again with you today.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Never done talking about fluency. There's always something to say.

Melissa:

We love talking about fluency. It's nice something to say. We love talking about fluency. It's nice to be back, thank you for the invitation.

Lori:

Of course, and it is one of our listeners' favorite topics. Everything on social media that we put about fluency just goes crazy. So we are really excited today to really focus on automaticity, which we know is a really important element of fluency. So I'm hoping you can start us off by sharing a little bit about the relationship between words correct per minute, which our listeners might be familiar with the acronym WCPM, and automaticity in reading right? So how do these impact your overall reading fluency?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well that we measure automaticity with WCPM. There may be other ways of measuring it. There probably are. But as practitioners in a classroom that is the typical way we measure automaticity and I think that's one of the problems or challenges that the assessment people who understand that WCPM is measuring automaticity, that's not always conveyed to teachers and it really feels in many ways like you're just measuring rate, like you're just measuring rate and we often talk about rate or even speed as part of fluency. The National Reading Panel did that In their chapter on fluency. They kept talking about fluency in slightly different ways, but always the same three components. It's always accuracy, rate and expression or prosody. But there were some times in the National Reading Panel where they said fluency is the ability to read quickly, accurately and with good expression.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Thinking has evolved a little bit and I've been assured by one of the co-authors of that chapter that reading quickly would not be listed as the definitive component because it's not the quickness, it is the automaticity and automaticity. We prefer that term because it does include accuracy. Accuracy you all know I've preached it so many times. Accuracy is the foundation of fluency. That's where we start that we cannot sacrifice accuracy if comprehension is our goal, which it always is. So once we have a foundation of accuracy and that can be at, you know, just even at a letter level we're talking about. This letter is M and now you know it. Now let's see if we can identify it a little more quickly. And that quick identification of a letter, a sound, a word, the automatic recognition of words and phrases, that is the key stone of fluency. But we always start with accuracy. We've in rate, which then becomes that marriage of automaticity and eventually we pay attention to expression and prosody. It's not irrelevant, but it's those first two things. It's the accuracy and automaticity.

Jan Hasbrouck:

And, as you said, the best way for us to measure automaticity is correct per minute. We can do that. You mentioned words correct per minute, which is typically the oral reading fluency or ORF curriculum-based measure that we're using in many different forms. Lots of different commercial products these days measure ORF, but ORF is when you administer ORF. The outcome, the metric is you're measuring words correct per minute.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But for our emerging readers we can use an automaticity measure of letter name fluency, letter sound fluency, which I and many others wished we had named letter naming automaticity, letter sound automaticity nonsense, word automaticity, so that we're real, clear and real accurate, and in fact we could say oral reading automaticity or something like that, a better name than oral reading fluency, because fluency really does include that prosody and expression. And that's another confusing thing. Like we're measuring fluency but you said fluency has prosody and yeah, so let's just think of words correct per minute as automaticity. It's the centerpiece, it's what makes fluency important, because once automaticity is achieved at that letter, sound, word, phrase, text level, when that's achieved and we pay attention, of course, to the top of Scarborough's rope and we know what those words mean and we understand the syntax and semantics and we can use our inferencing skills and our background knowledge, we have comprehension and the key to that is that automaticity piece.

Melissa:

Jan, can I follow up with what you just mentioned there? I actually saw I know we talked about this the last time you were on too, but I saw some confusion online where people were saying about the ORF and the comprehension and that link between them and some people were confused by they were saying, well, is it a measure of comprehension itself? And I think you and I would both say no, it's not. But can you explain that a little bit for our listeners?

Jan Hasbrouck:

Sure, I'll try. We've got a couple hours right To talk about that. Yes, I have been so measuring comprehension, let's just start there. I have been very influenced by my many of my very brave colleagues I think all of my colleagues in the field as reading researchers who take on comprehension. I put them all on pedestals Like really I stayed with fluency, this narrowly defined, complex but nothing like comprehension.

Jan Hasbrouck:

So I'm particularly influenced by the work of Hugh Katz who has, so to me, clearly articulated a couple of things. One is that comprehension exists. It's really important, it's essential, it's the whole purpose of reading in many ways. But the second point he makes to teachers all the time is that it's incredibly hard to measure. And it's incredibly hard to measure because it is so complex and multifaceted he talks about. Every reader has multiple strengths and weaknesses in comprehension because of multiple factors attention, background, knowledge, interest, all kinds of things. So he even in a seminar and I quote him all the time kind of waggling his fingers at teachers.

Jan Hasbrouck:

They say stop trying to measure comprehension as if it's a single thing, stop, stop that. But then he doesn't say so, you can't even try. He says there are other ways that you can get at the underlying components of comprehension and he made a little bulleted list in the seminar that I'm thinking about. The first thing on that list was words correct per minute. Here's from Hugh Katz, one of the world's experts in comprehension, saying the best thing you can do in a classroom to get a peek at a student's comprehension is measure words correct per minute. It's not the only thing on this list and it never should be, but what we know and I would just look this up the other day because I got an email from somebody basically asking me that same question my colleagues are saying well, actually it was a little bit different. She had attended a webinar where somebody said you should stop using oral reading fluency words correct for a minute because it doesn't tell you anything about comprehension. Interesting, yeah, no that is absolutely not true.

Melissa:

I mean.

Lori:

This is why there's so many, so much confusion in the field. There's so many ways to get information and, honestly, teachers don't have the access to the research portals, nor the time, and it's very you know, it's hard to read, to be honest.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Right. And then they go on a webinar and people are saying the opposite of what some other expert is saying. So I sent her a couple of articles One, I think quite recently 2022, that looked at third graders Once again. I mean, people keep studying Words Correct Per Minute, I think, in part because it's you know, it's just such, as I have said, a weird little assessment that we can really get anything out of a 60second cold read from a kid. So people keep studying it like, come on, really, this can't be true.

Jan Hasbrouck:

So this study was 2022, looking at third graders and comparing the third grade to the outcome. That one of the outcomes we would measure comprehension was as a state assessment. So the state assessment of third grade, which is, you know, all the state assessments, are essentially reading comprehension tests, and these researchers said we need to keep doing this because those state tests keep changing. So what we think of as comprehension in a practical arena, like a state test, keeps changing. So does ORF continue to predict, not measure? So now I've come back to answering your question. No, orf does not measure comprehension, but it remains one of the best indicators of comprehension. Far from perfect. Everybody who works with multilingual learners knows that we can do a really good job of getting kids to decode with automaticity. But they may not be comprehenders and that's not going to show up in a word correct per minute assessment. But we know that we're professionals. We can look at that. But when these researchers say and there was a quote something like over the last four decades, nothing has surpassed oral reading fluency in the ability to predict with reasonable accuracy students' likely comprehension, and it takes a minute, that's the tradeoff.

Jan Hasbrouck:

You want to measure comprehension? You can go find a school psychologist or a cognitive psychologist or maybe a lot of special educators who can truly measure the best we can, the kind of stuff that Hugh Katz is saying Real comprehension, multifaceted, multiple hours. You have all kinds of different ways of getting at comprehension. We can do that. But no classroom teacher should do that or has. That's not where we should be spending our time. So instead, let's measure. Let's do a one minute measure and get a pretty good idea of where kids are as an indicator.

Jan Hasbrouck:

So yeah, I stand solidly with the people who think it's a strange test. I do, I get it. I cannot wrap my head. I still have some issues with that part of it, but I've looked at the research, I've done the research. I use it all the time and again. Not just the text, I use it all the time and again. Not just the text, oral reading fluency, but the letter naming sound. The letter sound fluency. Letter naming fluency nonsense. Word fluency differentiates kids real fast to say you're on track. You're going to need a little or a lot of help to get on track. You can get on track. So any of those automaticity-based measures do tell us a lot.

Melissa:

Yeah, and it sounds like some students would benefit from those other assessments you're talking about with comprehension, specifically Like if you're seeing that there's something going on here that you need to dig deeper and find out more. But for a classroom full of students, this is a really the oral reading, fluency and all the other fluency assessments are great places to start to get a picture.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yes, the screening that we do with all the kids and differentiate those we we're sure they're fine, they're likely fine, they might not be fine and deeply at risk. We can do that. Classroom teachers can do that quite efficiently.

Lori:

And then, yeah, then we turn to our colleagues, our specialists, to dig deeper as needed. I find that so reassuring that these quick tests can tell us so much, because I feel like it's not just quick but it's also frequent. We're not giving it, like you know, once at the beginning of the year, you know once at the end of the year, right? We're giving it throughout the year to measure progress on a regular basis. I'm not saying you know, every week, but we would be giving it semi-regularly to get an idea of you know, hearing a student read for a minute in September, hearing a student read for a minute in November, hearing a student read for a minute in January, and just really tracking that progress over time. I know the letter naming ones depending on the student, might be a little bit more frequent, right, depending on their needs and where they fall within those assessment categories. I should say so. I'm just curious if you wanted to react to that at all, jan. I should say so. I'm just curious if you wanted to react to that at all, jan.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, even the oral reading fluency can in fact be given more frequently when we change its use, the category of assessment to progress monitoring, from benchmark screening. We can use all of those automaticity measures for that purpose and some of them top out like you're sort of saying that like letter naming fluency. We don't use that with third graders because it's that predictive power. And even oral reading fluency we know that it loses its predictive power as an indicator when students are reading at about the fifth grade level, which may mean we can use it in middle school and high school if those kids are, as many of them are stuck reading around the third or fourth grade level. It still is a very reasonable indicator. So we can use them more frequently.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But you're right, we can use them frequently, in part because it's easy to create multiple measures. We don't have to take the same passage and read it five different times across the year. We can use various forms and the efficiency, how quickly we can administer it. And another thing that we can look at it's often I know Stephanie Stoller and a lot of people that are really into the MTSS world remind us that those assessments, looked at more broadly, can also help with program evaluation, not just individual student decisions. But if we look at how are all the second graders doing in this school from fall winter, spring, we can make some really important decisions about the effectiveness of tier one and use our resources wisely that way, so that incredible data has many uses. Not to measure comprehension doesn't do that, but it can help evaluate programs and it can give us an indicator of risk.

Melissa:

Great, and you answered another question. I hear a lot, which is why there are not high school Hasbro and Tyndall tables for fluency. So thank you for bringing that up. We don't really need them.

Jan Hasbrouck:

We don't really need them. Other researchers Tim Rosinski has done some work with this. Other people have too, but if you look at, this is an article I need to write to really clarify this for people. But if you look at our last two studies 2017, Hasbrook Tyndall, 2017 and 2006, where 2006, we did go up through eighth grade, but right around fifth grade, you see at the 50th percentile, a leveling off at about 150, which is words correct per minute, which is exactly what Rosinski found when he went up and looked at high school and even proficient college readers. Somewhere around 150 to 200 is where automaticity levels off, which makes sense.

Jan Hasbrouck:

We don't get faster and faster and faster and faster as we age. What proficient readers do is they're able to maintain that level of automaticity even though the text is getting harder. That's what's changing Between eighth grade and 10th grade. We hope that the text is significantly harder, but the kids who are proficient readers or advanced readers can maintain a level of fluency, and we also know that level of fluency around 150 to 200 mirrors spoken language, which is really important because the whole purpose of all of this is comprehension.

Jan Hasbrouck:

So if we read faster than our brain can understand, it doesn't do us any good than our brain can understand. It doesn't do us any good. That's why slow automaticity or weak automaticity is really a problem, because it's too slow for our brain to comprehend. We want to get up to a level of automaticity which mirrors spoken language, because spoken language is what our brain comprehends. So there's no point except, you know, skimming and scanning, I guess studying for trying to get to the end of a novel or something like that. But that's a whole different kind of reading. For most reading, where we really do want to comprehend what we've read, getting up to that range is good enough and we don't expect or want kids to get faster and faster. So if you have high school students who are not reading at grade level, you can give them grade level passage. If they're not somewhere around 150, then you have found a child who needs some extra attention and intervention, found a child who needs some extra attention and intervention, and then that kicks in a whole other set of assessment types.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's so helpful and I think it brings us around to something you wanted to chat with us about today, which was this other study that was all about NAEP scores with fourth graders, and you actually found something in that study that made you rethink some of the things you were thinking about fluency. And I have to tell you Jan, from my seat and probably from teachers, to hear that, like Jan Hasbrook was rethinking something, she thought about fluency, which is her thing. I love that mindset of, just like you know, there's research and I'm rereading it and I'm changing my thinking if there's research that says something different than what I was saying. So anyway, I'm going to pass it over to you to talk to us all about that and what you saw in this study.

Jan Hasbrouck:

All right, Well, thank you, melissa. That makes me feel very encouraged, because I do feel a little bit of mea culpa on this one, because I was pretty sure of myself and have been al who did what I thought was Think. Still Think was a really brilliant study and very, very helpful to those of us who understand the importance of fluency and automaticity particularly, and what we should be doing about it in the classroom. So that study came out 2021. It was published. It was an IES grant funded project where, yes, they looked, they went back and looked at 2018 NAEP scores, which is part of the excellence, I think, of this because it's pre-COVID, so we don't have to worry about you know COVID stuff. These were kids their school career out. You know COVID stuff. These were kids their school career, fourth graders who had been untouched by the pandemic and what the NAEP does.

Jan Hasbrouck:

The NAEP is. We talked about comprehension assessments. The NAEP is a widely accepted, fairly rigorous assessment of reading comprehension. Students read passages and answer multiple choice questions and their performance is then is categorized as advanced or proficient, or basic or below basic, where proficient really means solidly at grade level generally that teacher talk, but solidly at grade level, you give them pretty much any grade level material. They're likely to be able to comprehend it. Basic means they can understand it at a basic level. Advanced are those kids we all know you can give them anything above grade level, they are really advanced comprehenders. And then the basic and then below basic. They even have below basic high and below basic medium and below basic low, because there's a bunch of kids down there so they differentiate them too.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But what these researchers did that was so, I think, so helpful certainly helpful to me in giving guidance to people in the field was they went back and looked at the students. They had access to these students' words correct per minute, oral reading fluency from their schools had done that tracking. So they went back and correlated those things and found very clear categories of automaticity, proficiency, words correct per minute, performance for those advanced readers, the proficient, the basic and below basic. And now, really for the first time, we had numbers. Up until that study I had theorized like based on my experience and based on my work with kids, that I knew from experience really, and there were some studies that showed the 50th percentile was really kind of the floor you had to be there, but I had then for years been saying it's the 75th percentile which is really. There's just no evidence that getting above that 75th percentile has any benefits. So that's the range you want to aim for as instruction.

Jan Hasbrouck:

And when I first read that study and I just reread it again they do cite my work Hasbrook and Tyndall norms. They say this aligns very much with the work of Hasbrook and Tyndall and all of that made me so excited. I must have blinked for a moment. And because I misinterpreted the correlation that they did I thought they were looking at the end of the year, hasbro contendal norms because I made an assumption. Someday I'm going to learn, really, really learn, to stop making assumptions. But I read over the part that said I assume NAEP was administered at the end of the year and that's where I got. I think I got so excited.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I just sort of skipped that part because it says very clearly in the article that NAEP these were scores from the middle of the year. So I was going around because I read a little too fast and I was saying look how these scores align almost perfectly with the 70 that the advanced students were reading right around 160. That was their average. They reported that in the article. The proficient students were reading around one at. In general they didn't say about that was their average of the advanced readers were 160 words correct per minute and that aligns exactly with the Hasbro and Tindall end of year 75th percentile. So I thought there you go. This proves that what I've been saying was right all along. And I said that, for I've been saying that in lots of webinars for quite a while. I said it in one of your podcasts, I've written about it. It's in a book that I wrote. I got to get that changed Because somebody very kindly reached out to me privately, not doing it on social media, but said I think I heard you say on Melissa and Lori Love Literacy that it's the 75th percentile that aligns with advanced readers and I don't think that's correct.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Like well, you're wrong, of course, I thought. And then I went back and read the article and was like oh dear, oh dear. Like oh dear, oh dear, yeah, that's correct. I was wrong because I was simply comparing their very clear scores 160 for advanced, 142 for proficient, 123 for basic and then 108 and lower for below basic and those did align so clearly with our end of year goals. But they, those researchers, white et al compared them to the Hasbro and Tyndall middle of the year goals and they do align. But we have to change our alignment a little bit because the 160 aligns more closely to the 90th percentile.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Our middle of the year 90th percentile is 168. And when you understand confidence intervals that puts that at the low end. So it's not that those advanced rears were actually at the 90th percentile, but they were certainly above the 75th percentile. So the high end of value to automaticity that's the way I want to talk about it, that there is value to automaticity and we know the numbers. Now you have to be somewhere around the 50th percentile, which on the Hasbro Continental Norms that changes up until about fifth grade. But it's that for grade level reading you have to be minimally in the vicinity of the 50th percentile. But there does appear to be advantage to getting close to the 90th percentile in that range, certainly slightly above the 75th. Our middle of the year 75th per fourth grade was 143.

Jan Hasbrouck:

And they're finding for the proficient that very good, but not superb, not advanced. So very good readers, proficient comprehenders, on the NAEP were exactly, essentially at our 75th percentile. So there are some readers who can read a little bit faster, not faster than speech, you know, but faster, and there may be for those readers some advantage to a little bit higher automaticity. But all the people, my caution, the but, is that we don't. I'm going to slow down my speech here because I really want to make a point.

Jan Hasbrouck:

We don't want any teacher to interpret that that the key to advanced comprehension is fast reading. That is not the correct interpretation of that. Automaticity is a key point. If you get at the 75th percentile, which is really really strong automaticity, and you have all the stuff at the top of Scarborough's rope, you need all of that. You have all the stuff at the top of Scarborough's rope, you need all of that Then you can have proficient, which is really good, really really good comprehension.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Some students are going to perhaps get to the advanced. And is that? Are they advanced because they're such good readers already and that is represented in automatism? We really don't know. But there is zero evidence that just getting kids to read faster is going to make them better comprehenders. This is not about fast reading. I'm so glad we started with the term automaticity. First of all. Automaticity has accuracy in there and we can't sacrifice that. But I have changed all my discussion to pointing out this wonderful study. White et al 2021, aligns with the middle of the year fourth grade norms for Hasbrook and Tyndall and changes our recommendations just a little bit that makes sense, and I'm thinking about when we talked about this the first time.

Melissa:

I think one thing I brought up was that you know, just normally in a school or in a classroom, you know our thought is that we want to get to 100 percent right on any assessment. That seems to like why would that not be our goal? So it sounds like the idea behind it is still the same, right? Is that like we don't necessarily need to get to 100%? 75% is still strong, but it might be a little higher than we thought.

Jan Hasbrouck:

A little bit higher. Yes, so in our norms we chose to only put them in those chunks of percentiles. We do have the whole percentile layout from 99 on down, but we don't share those. I mean that's not what we published, in part because that implies some precision, in part because that implies some precision and teachers get hung up on oh he's at the 77th but I want him at the 78th, like there's no functional difference between really those categories. That's why we said 50th is a category and we provide one number.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But there's good research of assessment people who say that number is not the real number. There's always a confidence interval around that number grade. That number is a range of plus 10 and minus 10 around the 50th percentile. So when you think about that, the 50th percentile, I mean the 90th percentile, plus and minus 10 is 168, minus 10 is 158. And that would be statistically within the range of what those advanced students performed on the White et al study. But it's a range and it's not precise.

Jan Hasbrouck:

And yes, although this study changed my thinking, informed my thinking that there is some advantage of a little bit higher, you don't have to even get to officially the 90th percentile. So it remains no evidence that just keep pushing, pushing, pushing has any benefit. And then keep thinking about the whole purpose of all this. It's not that number on the page where it's correct per minute. It's about comprehension. So these are indicators of comprehension. We want our students to be proficient comprehenders. Some of them might get too advanced, but automaticity, not speed, is what we're aiming for. And then all the components of Scarborough's rope need to be all woven in there too.

Melissa:

Yeah, and can we talk about that speed for a second, because I know we talked about that last time as well, but just to bring it back around. So there are still we want to watch out for that still of students who are reading too fast, right? My middle schoolers were just like this even if I told them not to try to reach for that 100% number, they still like. They're like I want to get there right, and they're trying to read as fast as they can. So can you talk a little bit about like how that can that can be a problem if we're pushing students or if students are pushing themselves to try to get to that highest number?

Lori:

Yeah, they're going to try for that Of course.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I mean, we've told them since the day they walked into kindergarten.

Jan Hasbrouck:

You know that, you know a hundred is the one you're going for. So, and faster is always better, and, you know, or higher is always better. They've internalized that, and a lot of teachers have too. I have tried to get people to rethink this and recalibrate it from traditional ways of measuring academic performance and thinking more of indicators of things like health and wellness, where somewhere around average is always perfect for an indicator. You want your blood pressure to be average, you want your cholesterol level to be average, you want your body temperature to be average. Those are wonderful, and when we think of oral reading, fluency as a measure, average or you know, slightly, slightly above now, 50th percentile, but in that range is is optimal, not faster and faster. So yeah, if we could convince our students to do that I'm going to cut your middle school students a little slack, though, because they're doing what they've essentially been taught to do, and if they do that just on an assessment, and especially if they're maintaining their accuracy, then okay.

Melissa:

Which they weren't, always they were showing off.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But when they then turn to their social studies book or the novel that they're reading or whatever, and they instead read that for comprehension, for understanding if they know how to turn off that speed racing, I would prefer that they do it during assessment as well.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But I get it and thinking of that, that's another piece of feedback you could give them. If they're sacrificing their accuracy for speed. You could give them their accuracy score and saying this is not acceptable. If you're not at least at 95%, you have to do it again. So even though you got to 227 words correct per minute, your accuracy was 87 or whatever. That's not acceptable because that's the most important score overall for comprehension. We don't usually take the time to measure that because it's woven into the words correct per minute score. But if I were trying to break a bad habit I might say both of those count. Both of those things count.

Lori:

Yeah, I love thinking about that and informing especially our older readers, who can really understand that and put some focus there, because I think they think that you know the more they read, the better and they're going to be good comprehenders, no matter what, but really actually showing them when you read that word wrong, you're not comprehending and that's a really big factor contributing to you not understanding what you're reading. And even one word really matters. And older kids, every word matters, yeah, and older kids, I think, get that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

There's an article that I quote a lot in my workshops that where these people found these, as little as 2% of the words will affect comprehension.

Jan Hasbrouck:

So that's saying that we should aim for 98%. I think a lot of the research that I've read on accuracy says 95 is I mean, and there's not a whole lot of difference between 95 and 98, but I like doing in some of my fluency workshops giving my audience of advanced or proficient readers I have to believe a piece of text from a medical journal in which it is really about 5% of the words are words that are simply unfamiliar to us. Now, as proficient readers, most people, I I think, can decode those six seven-syllable words. They can read them, but they don't know what they mean. And even 5% all the other words are very familiar words but nobody knows what that short paragraph means. You need to know almost all the words and not just decode them correctly but know what they mean in order to comprehend. So that's part of accuracy too. We measure it just in did you say that word correctly? But for true comprehension it's not just recognizing or it's knowing the word or being able to figure it out.

Lori:

Yeah, can we talk a little bit more about that? I would love to think about the other factors involved, right, like motivation, like background knowledge, like vocabulary that you just mentioned. Can you share a little bit more about how those play into comprehension, because it's so complex?

Jan Hasbrouck:

It is complex. And right away I'm going to say I said before I am not a comprehension researcher. I'm far too much of a coward, too lazy, too much of a coward to try to research that stuff about. I do think is represented beautifully perhaps not perfectly, but beautifully again in Scarborough's Rope. That top of the rope, all that language stuff. We say students need language to comprehend. But she has so nicely delineated that that includes background knowledge and she separates that from vocabulary. So you need that general knowledge but you also need knowledge of words and what they mean. Those language structures we've got a lot of students, and not just our multilingual learners, but they're far separated from the academic structure of syntax and semantics that is required for reading comprehension in their classrooms. And then her rope.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I'm looking down at it because I have not memorized all these strands but verbal reasoning, the ability to inference and understand what a metaphor is, which is all through. You know we start that stuff in kindergarten. The dog was as big as a house. Okay, is that true? Is that a metaphor? What does that mean? And then her last strand is those literacy concepts, print concepts and all the genres. I mean you read Tim Shanahan and Cindy Shanahan and others do such a good job of that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Talking about the cognitive demands that are different when you're reading different types of texts that are meant for different things. Narrative is very different than content materials. We read science texts differently than we read poetry. And knowing how to do that and getting the brains trained with experience to do those things yeah, it's super, super complex and we need to be thinking about those things. When the outcome is skilled reading, comprehension, motivation we can always hope for all of those things, but all of those pieces and including it's not just our multilingual learners that we need to be looking for the possibility for some additional targeted instruction or intervention to strengthen all of those strands.

Lori:

Thank you, that's so helpful. I love, too, that you look at the rope. I have it printed out and also look at it. I don't have it memorized. So thank you for being so real in saying that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, I do the same thing for the Hasbrook and Tyndall norms too.

Lori:

I have laminated. I had it pulled up when we're talking about it Generally.

Melissa:

I kind of know that is great If Jan Hasbrook has the.

Lori:

Hasbrook and Tyndall norms printed out. I mean, I can't imagine memorizing all those numbers. I we actually I did link it in the show notes, so it's in the show notes for everyone, in case you're looking for it. The research that Jan was talking about earlier as as well, by White et al. So it's all in the show notes. Yeah, you're welcome.

Melissa:

Jan, I had one last question for you that we did not talk about but I actually today was um. I saw another one of those kind of debates online and it was basically talking about repeated reading for fluency and the benefit of that, and some people were, you know, citing some evidence like we have had on our podcast. Chase Young came on and he said there is research that shows a benefit for repeated readings and that will even help on other texts. Right, it's not just limited to that text that they're reading repeatedly, but that will benefit them when they read other texts. Other people were saying that they're just memorizing the words there. That's not actually really helpful for fluency.

Melissa:

And the road they were going down was more of what we also had on the podcast and totally respect is Marianne Wolfe and she was talking about the possum approach and how you know you want to talk about the meanings of words and syntax and semantics and all the different parts so that they really get it In my brain. I kind of thought if there's research that supports both of these things that helps students with fluency, wouldn't we do both of them? I don't know why we have to always like put them against each other and say pick one or the other. But I was just curious if you had any thoughts on that, because people were really, you know, picking a side on that and I was just curious what you thought.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Well, another person we could put in sort of on Marianne's side would be Freddie Hebert side would be Freddie Hebert, who's done some stellar research and makes a really compelling argument for what I believe the term she uses the term I'm familiar with is wide reading instead of just repeated reading, which implies you take a piece of text and you read it multiple times. She's showing how wide reading different passages, but she does make the argument that it's especially beneficial if those different passages actually have a lot of overlap in the same word. So they really gives an opportunity for those multiple exposures that can lead to orthographic mapping. And so then we pick my understanding of her work, you would pick carefully what those repeated words are, because those are the words we want to be orthographically mapped. There are some words that we just don't worry about them being instantaneously recognized, whereas the high-frequency words or frequently occurring or important meaning words, we want those orthographically mapped. So wide reading has good evidence from Freddie Hebert and others. Others have studied that as well, but there is quite decades of research on the value of repeated reading. So both and yeah, I think there could be different activities and if you've got something like an intervention that I am very familiar with, now called Read Live, published by the Read Naturally Company, was one of the first targeted reading fluency interventions that I ever saw.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I saw it in the early 90s and started using it. I actually did a study with it because I wanted to be sure it looks like it should work, does it? And it did work. It improved the student's ability to read text, not just that one passage. And the argument that kids are memorizing. I would really challenge people to test that out, because what I find is when students are reading and they really should there's not a whole lot of value. After about seven times of one minute reads, practice over. You take, after even seven times, take that passage away and I have seen a few kids who can tell me the first two sentences and then it all falls apart. Very few can even get to the first two sentences and so they're not, they're not. They're not. They're not. Unless they have a photographic memory, they're not memorizing. But what they are getting is repeated exposure to, we hope, important words. They're getting confidence.

Jan Hasbrouck:

I find that kind of repeated reading intervention and Read Naturally does a cold read and they use that for motivation. You know their words correct per minute, which is not very good, and then they read it with a narrator to build the accuracy piece first, and then they do the automaticity with repeated one minute read like three to five to seven times and then they read the whole thing again. And because it happens in a short period of time, the students can really feel like a few minutes ago I couldn't read this and now I can read it and there. So there's motivation in there, there's practice with the feel of reading fluencies following a model, and I'm just mentioning that because I'm very familiar with it. There are many others, several others anyway that follow, that are based on repeated reading, that follow that basic structure.

Jan Hasbrouck:

But that's not all you would do. You would hope that these kids would have access to reading more widely and applying their newly tentative automaticity or fluency skills, really paying attention to expression and prosody and all of that as well, while always maintaining accuracy. So yeah, I don't think we need to say one works and the other doesn't. They are different approaches To me. I've not seen evidence to show oh, we used to think that worked and now it doesn't. I think we have evidence that they both work. So use them both or use them appropriately at the really early tentative stages, where kids are real behind and they've kind of given up, Something like a real targeted repeated reading can give them a little boost of confidence along with their skills, what I've seen, and so that's sort of you know, depending on the child we pick the right intervention. But the evidence to me, I think, is reasonably strong for both of those.

Melissa:

Yeah, and it makes sense. I'm glad you brought up the orthographic mapping because that in my brain the orthographic mapping is what leads to automaticity. Right. Orthographic mapping is what leads to automaticity. Right Is when you've orthographically mapped those words, now you can read them automatically and the repetition can be really. Some students need even more repetition than others, so that repeated reading can be really helpful for that.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yes, yes, the amount of repetition, practice dosage is a term being used these days varies widely and that is in fact. There's a lot of discussion in the special education world, that around that word. Dosage, that that's the differentiator, you know. All things being equal, some kids already have it, some kids get it with a little instruction, and almost everybody, that whole figure of 95% of kids, can be taught to read basically at least by, you know, by the end of grade two. Um, there's strong evidence, strong evidence, I think, that that somewhere in that vicinity that that's the number we can achieve and it's everybody benefits from instruction.

Jan Hasbrouck:

They basically all need the same stuff. Look at at Scarborough's rope, all that has to be there. But some kids already have all those things. They need their dosages, none dosage of instruction. Most kids in most classrooms, the average typical kid need the average typical amount of instruction and some kids need extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of instruction 50, 75 repetitions, 80, 90 repetitions. And we've got to figure out and we can't do that in the regular classroom, that's where Tier 2 and Tier 3 comes in. But yeah, the amount of practice, the amount of repetition, the dosage, if you will, is something we need to figure out as a system thing we need to figure out as a system.

Lori:

Not each teacher needs to figure that out but the system needs to acknowledge that difference in children. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. I'm thinking too. It's not necessarily in my brain. It wasn't like one versus the other, like repeated readings or this multi-component approach. It's really weaving them both together, jan, from what you just said, in a way that makes sense for the students in front of us. Right, right.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

Lori:

So helpful. Oh my gosh, I love thinking about this with you and we're so grateful that you came on again to talk about fluency. What a treat. We were thrilled the first time. We're even more thrilled the second time. So thank you so much and thank you for really being vulnerable and sharing your new learning with us and our listeners, and I feel like we all can relate to having those oh no, better, do better moments, and we're with you.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Love that motto. We need to embrace that motto no-transcript.

Lori:

I was like no, because we're always still learning, Just like you said. That's right, the research keeps coming. Yeah, Keep it on. Well, thank you so much, Dan. We are so grateful to have you back and you know we're just thrilled that you wanted to talk fluency again with us. So thank you.

Jan Hasbrouck:

Thank you for the opportunity.

Melissa:

It was a delight To stay connected with us. Sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, Join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

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