I was a shy, introverted kid, the kind who turned beet red when asked to read aloud in class, even in high school. I dreaded it. And I wasn’t alone. Round robin reading didn’t just make me self-conscious; it chipped away at my confidence and fluency. As it turns out, research backs this up: round robin reading isn’t just ineffective; it can be harmful, especially for students who struggle with reading fluency.
So why is this outdated routine still showing up in classrooms? Often, it’s because we teach the way we were taught. Familiar practices feel safe—and they rarely get questioned. Meanwhile, educational research doesn’t always reach classrooms quickly. It can take years, even decades, for new findings to shift old routines.
Following the research, old and new
Many educators understand that reading comprehension is a cognitively demanding task, and it can break down for many reasons: limited vocabulary, lack of background knowledge, and unfamiliar syntax, to name a few. But fewer people know how reading actually happens in the brain. For example, research shows that fluent readers can devote more mental energy to making meaning from a text, while disfluent readers spend most of their cognitive resources on decoding. This is the essence of the decoding threshold hypothesis: until decoding becomes automatic, comprehension suffers. As the field gains greater awareness of this threshold, we also gain new opportunities to support older readers in building fluency.
At the same time, educational research continues to evolve, offering deeper insights into how we read and how we should teach reading. For decades, studies showed a moderate correlation between reading fluency and comprehension, leading many educators to believe that fluency was simply a byproduct or outcome of comprehension. Emerging research now suggests a causal connection: fluency doesn’t just accompany comprehension—it enables it. This new understanding is important because it shifts our thinking about disfluency from being a minor obstacle that slows readers down to what it really is: a significant barrier to comprehension.
Why fluency is a growing concern in secondary classrooms
For years, The Nation’s Report Card has indicated a problem with reading comprehension for eighth-graders, with a main contributor being a lack of fluency. Today, there is even greater urgency to address this problem for two key reasons: 1) many students missed foundational reading instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2) other students never received explicit phonics instruction in the first place. As a result, secondary teachers are now facing a challenge that was once the domain of early elementary teachers: helping students become fluent readers. If you’re a secondary teacher feeling a bit out of your depth, I’d like to offer the following better (and research-backed!) ways to boost reading fluency for older students.
1. Start with empathy
To understand the issue of disfluency in middle and high school, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of a disfluent, adolescent reader. Disfluent readers may mispronounce words, skip punctuation, stumble over multisyllabic terms, or struggle with pacing and breath control. These challenges can be especially discouraging for adolescent readers, particularly when reading in front of their peers.
Fortunately, there are more effective and adolescent-friendly ways to build reading fluency, such as through echo reading, partner reading, repeated readings, and even a strategy for fostering conversations around “juicy sentences.”These fluency routines aren’t hard to implement—and they’re way less mortifying for teenagers.
2. Recognize what makes reading harder in middle and high school
Reading fluency challenges don’t disappear in upper grades, but they do change. A growing body of research shows how fluency is different for older students. There are three key differences:
- Different struggles. Adolescents struggle with decoding multisyllabic words, recognizing advanced and often unfamiliar vocabulary, and reading with proper expression or prosody.
- Different strategies. Middle and high school students need more advanced, discipline-specific comprehension strategies because the texts they are reading in ELA, math, science, and social studies are more advanced.
- Different motivators. Motivation for reading matters at every age, but what drives middle and high school students differs from what works in elementary grades. Adolescent readers often do better when texts are connected to their interests and goals.
3. Use data to find fluency gaps early
Data can be a powerful ally in helping us figure out which students need more support with reading fluency. But this only works well if the support we give is targeted, meaning it focuses on why comprehension is breaking down for a particular student. Is the student struggling with pronouncing multisyllabic words? Do they need a wider or deeper vocabulary? Are they missing foundational skills, like phonics and phonemic awareness?
Assessment data can be a window into what is happening with an individual reader. For example, students who appear in the low-growth, low-achievement quadrant based on their MAP® Growth™ Reading 6+ test score may be struggling with more than comprehension. They may be disfluent readers whose comprehension struggles are rooted in fluency gaps. That’s why we recommend using the following tools to support the needs of specific students:
- Formative assessments. Follow-up interim assessments like MAP Growth Reading 6+ with frequent formative assessments for any students who need it, especially to monitor oral reading fluency.
- Audio recordings. Whether you’re using MAP® Reading Fluency™ or an assessment specifically designed for middle and high school students, you can learn a lot from listening to a student’s self-recording. While listening to your students read aloud, pay attention to reading rate and accuracy, but especially to their rhythm and expression. It’s more important that older readers have strong prosody, including proper expression, phrasing, and intonation, than that they read at a very fast pace. Strong prosody offers advantages in comprehension processing, which is why effective fluency instruction for secondary students goes beyond automatic word recognition and emphasizes prosody.
- Qualitative rubric. Using a qualitative rubric, like the multidimensional fluency scale on page 19 of Assessing Reading Fluency, can offer a more complete picture of an individual reader. For example, this data can help you decide if a student might benefit from practice with syllabication and morphology or repeated readings that focus on prosody, such as re-reading the same poem using different voices.
4. Make small but powerful shifts in reading instruction
Minor changes to your existing curriculum can be made with very little prep time and can have a huge impact on reading fluency. This was the key finding of a recent NWEA research study conducted with AERDF through a grant from Reading Reimagined. “We just haven’t been able to move the needle,” said Laura Hansen, principal investigator for the Reading Reimagined grant and vice president of assessment design for NWEA. “But this study shows we can. And it’s not that complicated.”
You can read about these and other findings in the fluency study report. Most noteworthy is the fact that students scoring below the 50th percentile on the Capti Assess Reading Efficiency subtest showed statistically significant improvement from pre- to post-test. These gains were seen immediately after the intervention and during a delayed follow-up test. Also, the intervention used in the study was especially promising for students who had lower initial reading fluency scores. While the study results cannot be generalized due to the small sample size, these findings suggest strong potential for targeted fluency support in middle school.
Other important learnings from the study include:
- A structured fluency protocol that combines repeated reading, language strategies, and culturally relevant texts can support middle school readers in building fluency
- Student engagement notably increased when texts reflected students’ backgrounds and when goal setting was a part of the process
- Teachers greatly benefited from professional learning that supported their implementation of fluency strategies
- Even small-scale interventions yielded meaningful insights into reading development for historically marginalized students
According to Laura, the most important learning for educators is that the situation is fixable. “We can turn it around for kids with focused, intensive, short-term intervention,” she said. “We spent 20 minutes a day on fluency for 30 days. That’s 600 minutes—and we saw big gains!”
5. Boost comprehension with easy-to-use mini-lessons
Laura also noted how important it is to support secondary teachers as they learn about fluency instruction. “Teachers recognized the need,” she said. “But they were frustrated because their preservice education hadn’t equipped them to address it.” Offering easy-to-use tools that didn’t require specialized knowledge was all they needed to get started. “And they were super grateful,” said Hansen.
A 15-minute mini-lesson on syllabication, for example, can help students decode science terms like “evaporation” (e-vap-o-ra-tion). Then a follow-up mini-lesson on morphology can help them unpack prefixes like e- (“out”) and roots like vapor (“steam”).
The study showed that just a few intentional shifts in our instructional routines can help older students become more fluent, confident readers—one day at a time.
A final challenge: Try one small shift
We’ve all had those teaching moments where we pause and ask, “Why am I doing it this way?” Sometimes the honest answer is, “Because it’s how I was taught, and I turned out okay.” For me, discovering more effective, less stressful ways to build reading fluency was a relief. And it was a good reminder that we don’t have to keep teaching a certain way just because it’s familiar.
So here’s the challenge: What’s one small shift you’d like to try with your students this year?
