Elizabeth M. Frye

Validating Craft Knowledge

This longitudinal study investigated childrens performance on several informal reading and spelling tasks. Students (n = 274) in a rural North Carolina county were assessed across grades 2 to 6 on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed), oral reading accuracy, reading comprehension, reading rate, and spelling. Statistics (means and standard deviations) were reported for each measure each year. Overall, the results tended to support traditional performance criteria in reading diagnosis. Two findings that deserve further study were (1) word recognition–timed proved to be a good predictor of oral reading rate at each grade level (median r = .68), and (2) both oral and silent reading rates, after increasing steadily from grade 2 to 4, began to taper off between grades 4 and 6. This second finding is in contrast to previous reading-rate data reported by Hasbrouck and Tindal and by Taylor.

The Role of Reading Rate in the Informal Assessment of Reading Ability

This article, which focuses on oral reading rate, reports findings from a large assessment study in rural North Carolina. Students in grades 2 to 6 were assessed on the following measures: isolated word recognition (timed and untimed); oral reading accuracy, reading rate, and reading comprehension. Overall, the results (1) support traditional “instructional-level” criteria in reading diagnosis (e.g., word recognition-timed = 75%; oral reading accuracy = 95%); (2) provide tentative oral reading rate minimums for each grade level, 2 through 6; and (3) suggest that a word recognition-in-isolation measure, if timed (½ second), is an excellent predictor of oral reading rate or fluency. Practical implications accompany each of these findings.

Three DIBELS Tasks vs. Three Informal Reading/Spelling Tasks: A Comparison of Predictive Validity

Within a developmental framework, this study compared the predictive validity of three DIBELS tasks (phoneme segmentation fluency [PSF], nonsense word fluency [NWF], and oral reading fluency [ORF]) with that of three alternative tasks drawn from the field of reading (phonemic spelling [phSPEL], word recognition-timed [WR-t], and graded passage reading [grPASS), an oral reading fluency measure). Two cohorts of students (n = 319) were assessed with the aforementioned tasks multiple times across a four-year period—middle of kindergarten through end of third grade. The results were clear and closely replicated in the two cohorts: (a) phSPEL (moderate) outperformed DIBELS PSF (weak to moderate) in predicting future orthographic-unit processing; (b) WR-t (very strong) outperformed DIBELS NWF (moderate) in predicting future oral reading fluency; and (c) DIBELS ORF and grPASS were equally good predictors (moderately strong) of future reading comprehension.

Rapid Word Recognition as a Measure of Word-Level Automaticity and Its Relation to Other Measures of Reading.

The present study investigated the relationship between rapid recognition of individual words (Word Recognition Test) and two measures of contextual reading: (1) grade-level Passage Reading Test (IRI passage) and (2) performance on standardized STAR Reading Test. To estabilish if time of presentation on the word recognition test was a factor in predicting contextual reading performance, four computerized presentation times were used: 300 msec, 650 msec, 1000 msec, adn 2000 msec. Regression analyses revealed that, for both third- and fourth-grade students, there was evidence that presentation times of less than 1 second better approximated performance on the two contextual reading measures.