ORF: The Most Reliable Assessment of Reading Comprehension
If you are an elementary teacher, you are likely (hopefully!) giving an oral reading fluency (ORF) measure on your universal screening assessment at the beginning, middle, and end of year. What you might not know is how incredibly valuable ORF scores are in terms of planning literacy instruction, and, you likely still have questions about your students’ literacy skills after you give the assessment.
Today I want to talk all about ORF. We’ll discuss:
What it is
The research that supports it as the strongest correlative assessment of a students’ overall reading comprehension
What its individual scores represent
How it helps us plan our instruction
Why it’s the perfect tool for IEP goals and progress monitoring
A common misconception about ORF
I hope this post helps you understand how ORF can empower and guide your instruction.
What is ORF?
To begin, let’s define ORF. ORF stands for “Oral Reading Fluency”. Oral reading fluency is a
universal screening measure that assesses the following essential early literacy skills (Acadience Manual, p 89):
Advanced phonics and word attack skills
Accurate and fluent reading of connected text
Reading comprehension
Essential early literacy skills are skills students must achieve in order to become proficient readers.
ORF is found on effective universal screeners like Acadience, DIBELS 8, Fastbridge, Aimsweb, or Easy CBM. If you use a computer adaptive screener that does not include ORF, you can access Acadience ORF passages for free here. My favorite screener is Acadience Reading because it is criterion-referenced rather than norm referenced, which means the measures are predictive of future reading outcomes.
Ideally, there are two parts to ORF:
The student reads a grade level text aloud for one minute and
The student retells the passage
Most screeners only include part one. The retell serves as an extra measure of reading comprehension, but its correlation as a reliable measure of reading comprehension is not as strong as ORF Words Correct per Minute. During an ORF assessment, the student reads the grade level passage aloud, the teacher marks student errors on a scoring booklet. Then the teacher records the number of words read correctly per minute, and the percentage of words read accurately.
What research do we have on ORF?
The WCPM score is the most well-researched indicator of a student’s overall reading comprehension. In a 2001 study by Fuchs et. al, researchers found a .91 effect size for oral reading fluency words correct per minute (WCPM). In the same study, question answering was a .82 score, retelling a .70, and cloze measures a .72. Keep in mind, a perfect correlation is 1.0, meaning WCPM has a very STRONG correlation to reading comprehension. If a student’s WCPM is high, their comprehension is also likely to be high. In other words, if you lined up 10 students from lowest to highest on WCPM and then ordered the same students lowest to highest on any other reading comprehension assessment, 9 out of 10 of those students would line up perfectly. An effect size of .9 indicates that almost everything that explains a student’s reading comprehension can be attributed to WCPM. This affirms the value of universal screening– in just one minute we can get a reliable indication of a student’s overall reading comprehension, and we can trust that if a student reads accurately and fluently they are very likely to understand what they are reading.
ORF is a reliable indicator of a student’s overall reading comprehension. However, this doesn’t mean we have all the information we need to plan instruction. Below we’ll talk about the data-based decision making process that helps us flip ORF to instruction.
How does ORF help us with instruction?
On most universal screeners, ORF has two scores– the WCPM score and the accuracy score.
The accuracy score is a percentage. It represents the percentage of words read correctly in one minute. When you think of accuracy, think of decoding– this score represents a student’s advanced decoding and word attack skills.
The WCPM score is an indicator of a student’s fluency in reading connected text, and their overall reading comprehension. Usually this is where some teachers abandon ORF because they don’t understand how it assesses reading comprehension, or how to use the data to plan their instruction. But think about it– if a student isn’t reading fluently, they most certainly aren’t comprehending what they are reading. An essential early literacy skill is missing– contributing to slow, choppy reading. This could be decoding, or a language comprehension skill such as syntactic awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary, inference making, or the ability to connect ideas across sentences as the child reads (this is not an exhaustive list). A low WCPM score is our first red flag that fluency and comprehension aren’t where they need to be.
When you give ORF at the beginning of the year and a child is below benchmark, look at the WCPM first. Are they below the benchmark in that score? If yes, this is an indicator that fluency and comprehension skills are low. However, before we decide to work on fluency in service of facilitating reading comprehension, we need to check the accuracy score to discern whether decoding is the root cause of the poor fluency and comprehension score. Are they below benchmark in accuracy? If not, then you can rule out decoding and focus your small group instruction on building fluency. If you determine that a child is accurate and fluent, but not comprehending, then you might choose to do a comprehension diagnostic like Acadience CFOL or CUBED to determine the student’s specific comprehension needs and plan instruction. The data-based decision making tool below is free and can support you in this thinking process!
Data-based Decision Making Tool
We build fluency through activities like:
Repeated Reading
Choral Reading
Scooping and Phrasing
We build comprehension through activities like:
Syntax and sentence level comprehension
Main Idea and Summarizing
Using graphic organizers
Helping students monitor their comprehension
Teach inference
Build vocabulary and knowledge
If they are below benchmark in accuracy, you need to do a decoding diagnostic to determine which phonics skills they are missing. The data from your decoding diagnostic will inform what you teach during small group to support decoding.
We build decoding ability through activities like:
Reading words
Spelling words
Morphology instruction
Multisyllabic word instruction
Reading & rereading decodable texts
ORF as a Progress Monitoring Tool
In addition to using ORF as a beginning, middle, and end of year screening measure, ORF can also be used to frequently monitor student progress. Using ORF as a progress monitoring measure is appropriate for students who are below benchmark in ORF WCPM but above benchmark in ORF accuracy, meaning the student is a great decoder but not comprehending well because their fluency is lacking.
The ORF measure you select should match the student’s lowest skill deficit, not necessarily their grade level. For example, if I have a third grade student who is below the benchmark in third grade ORF at the beginning of the school year, I would check their second grade ORF to see if they can hit the second grade benchmark. If they can, then I set a goal that allows my student to meet the third grade middle of year benchmark on time. I would then give that student a weekly, beginning of year third grade ORF measure to track their progress toward that goal.
On the other hand, if that student is below the benchmark on the grade 2 ORF measure, I would set a goal to meet the grade 2 benchmark in half the amount of time it would normally take. The reason for cutting the time in half to reach the goal is because we aren’t just responding with instruction that fills the gaps. Our instruction has to be intense enough to catch them up to their peers and get them on track ASAP.
If you have students on IEPs, consider writing goals using ORF benchmarks. An ORF WCPM goal is much more reliable as an indicator of student growth in fluency and reading comprehension, rather than having goals that ask students to memorize high frequency words or decode 8/10 words at some random percentage of time. Goals like this track aquisition of random phonics skills, rather than essential early literacy skills. We want to track essential early literacy skills.
A Common Misconception about ORF: Why aren’t the passages decodable?
The simple answer is that decodable texts and ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) do not have the same purposes. Decodable texts are a vehicle for fluency, an instructional tool for helping students become fluent in the phonics skills they are learning. The purpose of ORF, and every universal screening measure, is to identify students who are at risk by providing indicators of essential literacy skill acquisition, so that we can give them the type and amount of instruction they need to be on track.
If the passages on ORF were decodable, we would only know if students had mastered the phonics patterns that are focused on in the decodable. With an ORF passage, students are not expected to read the entire passage. They read for one minute so that we know how are students applying word attack skills, fluency, and comprehension knowledge in an uncontrolled, grade level authentic text. This quote below from Dr. Stollar captures it well:
“I think about the difference between decodable text and ORF more like general outcomes measurement and mastery measurement. ORF tells you IS the student on track for good reading in the future. Decodable text tells you DID the student learn the phonics patterns you previously taught. ORF is a formative assessment and decodable text is summative assessment.” - Dr. Stephanie Stollar
Final Thoughts
I hope after reading this you feel empowered and know what to do once you have your initial beginning of the year screening data. ORF is only useful if we know how to analzye the scores, and the path to take beyond that initial data analysis. If you want to learn more about ORF, consider following Dr. Stephanie Stollar on youtube. She posts short videos that explain how useful ORF is as an assessment tool. And, if you have questions, leave a comment! ORF is one of my favorite things to talk about ;).
