October 18th, 2010 Blog

New book club blog posting based on this week’s assigned readings—What is the relationship between reading comprehension and reading fluency? What approaches are used to assess and teach fluency in your classroom? What else do you need to know to fully understand your students’ reading development? How could you find out?


I think that fluency specifically deals with students accuracy. It's reading smoothly, not too slow, and paying attention to punctuation and grammar- basically the skeleton of reading. Comprehension is taking the meaning out of what you have just read. For example, I am placed in a third grade room and there are a lot of people lacking comprehension AND fluency, but mostly comprehension. As another example, I just babysat for a child who is also in third grade and I was shocked at how fluently he read AND what he comprehended. It's possible for a child to comprehend what they are reading even if they lack fluency, but it would be more slowly. They would also comprehend less information since they are reading more slowly and choppily.

In my class, we use the DRA to score the children's reading. This takes into account the time it takes for the student to read (words per minute), mistakes, self corrections, stumbles over words, and also comprehension at the end of the DRA test. All of these things are more of a label that the DRA test can place on a student for the benefit of the teacher placing the students in guided reading groups and similar groups that might need to work on comprehension or other reading qualities. We also have one on one student conferencing which really takes into account what the students are reading and if it's the right level and difficulty. These are a good idea if the teacher isn't sure what the student needs to be working on, because the teacher can hear the student read out loud and asses based on that, rather than having to be keeping a score (like on the DRA).

I think that there needs to be a way to asses the students writing and reading connected, such as with answering questions derived from the text. I think that would really show the students comprehension. Working one on one is really important as to figuring out what the student needs to work on and it also allows you to see the student not affected by other students and student's answers around them.