Primary schools should measure pupils’ reading fluency to help tackle the disadvantage gap and narrow the gender divide at key stage 2, new research suggests.
The research measured how many words children in Year 1 to Year 6 could accurately read aloud in a passage of text in one minute.
This revealed a wide “fluency gap” between disadvantaged pupils and their peers, with the median number of words read correctly per minute typically 10-15 fewer among disadvantaged pupils.
This fluency gap “explained” around half of the disadvantage gap in key stage 2 reading tests, the researchers from FFT Education Datalab found.
Given that oral reading fluency is quick and easy to assess, “it’s likely to be an extremely useful indicator for schools to measure”, the researchers conclude.
The low level of reading fluency among the lowest quartile of readers “is likely to indicate a reading difficulty that will impact this group across the curriculum”, they warn.
“Monitoring the oral reading fluency of the lowest quartile of readers, in particular, and addressing this deficit as early as possible, should be a concern of government and schools alike,” they add.
Boosting reading fluency ‘could halve KS2 gender gap’
Reading fluency was also shown to impact the gap between boys and girls in key stage 2 Sats.
On average, girls in the sample achieved a KS2 reading test score of 104.0, 1.7 points higher than that of boys (102.3). Just under half of this gap was due to girls having higher reading fluency, FFT found.
“This would suggest that increasing the fluency of boys to the level of girls would reduce the gap in reading comprehension scores by half,” the researchers note.
They also say in a blog that the data has implications for the structure of the KS2 Reading paper - in particular its length, “as papers that are too long risk becoming assessments largely of reading speed”.
The blog advocates the use of strategies to improve reading fluency. According to the Education Endowment Foundation, these strategies can include singing with repeated refrains that children join in with, repeated reading aloud from picture books and “choral reading” where pupils read aloud in unison.
The FFT research examined the reading assessments of more than 100,000 pupils in 700 primaries, using data from FFT’s Reading Assessment Programme (RAP), an online assessment tool.
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