The sentence reading fluency metric is the hidden gem of MAP® Reading Fluency™. This little treasure is included between the foundational skills and oral reading metrics in MAP Reading Fluency reports.
While oral reading rate, accuracy, and literal comprehension often get all the attention when it comes to oral reading metrics—and while the science of reading spotlight is on the foundational skills heavy hitters phonological awareness plus phonics and word recognition—I like to think of sentence reading fluency as a data point quietly glittering on the treasure map of MAP Reading Fluency reporting.
Why sentence reading fluency matters
Sentence reading fluency is a small but mighty metric. It provides an indicator of fluency of connected text before students are reading at a passage level, providing a “snack size” metric of how well students are starting to put together words into phrases and sentences with comprehension. Just like a snack size candy bar gives you a taste of the full-size version, the sentence reading fluency metric gives you a taste for its bigger counterpart: passage reading.
Sentence reading fluency is important to think about as an indicator of what’s to come for students acquiring reading skills, specifically those firming up the constrained foundational skills, building language comprehension, and getting ready for the stamina required for the word count and comprehension in passage reading.
How MAP Reading Fluency measures sentence reading fluency
MAP Reading Fluency measures sentence reading fluency with a two-minute task of silent sentence reading, although some students may still need to read aloud. The sentences vary in complexity from quite simple, such as, “The dog sits,” to much more sophisticated, like “The brown dog sits under the shady tree near the lake.” While completing the task, students choose the picture that matches the sentence.
Students lean on their skills of automaticity with high-frequency words, decoding, and sentence-level comprehension when completing the task. The raw score is reported as a fraction, such as 4/5 or 15/20; the number of sentences the student attempted is represented by the denominator, and the number of sentences they got correct is the numerator.
Sentence reading fluency is evaluated in the following MAP Reading Fluency benchmark screening tests:
- Foundational Skills and Dyslexia Screener tests. Students read sentences in addition to completing tasks measuring listening comprehension, picture vocabulary, phonological awareness, and phonics and word recognition.
- Adaptive Oral Reading. Students are given the sentence reading fluency task first, and how they score determines if they route to foundational skills testing or oral passage reading in that testing session. Either way, they will finish the test in approximately 30 minutes.
- Adaptive Oral Reading Passages Only. Students read sentences as well as up to three oral reading fluency passages.
Learning to read is messy—but assessing students doesn’t have to be
There are a lot of moving parts involved in learning to read. Students are called on to master constrained skills, shown on the lower strand of Scarborough’s Reading Rope, while simultaneously expanding their ever-growing knowledge of language comprehension, represented by the upper strand. Students are also putting words together into sentences and then into longer passages while building the automaticity that enables comprehension. As the laborious job of decoding becomes more automatic, the cognitive load is lessened, freeing up mental space for comprehension—even if only for matching a picture and sentence. Some students build automaticity quickly while others need more fluency practice in the classroom before they are ready to take on passage reading.
Assessing students in grade 1 can feel especially challenging. First graders likely start the year taking the Foundational Skills or Dyslexia Screener benchmark test, as is our recommendation. By winter, they may be taking the Adaptive Oral Reading test, though some students aren’t ready for it until the spring. The sentence reading fluency metric is a data point in the two tests that makes it easier to compare growth between the testing events.
Developmentally, there is a wide variety of scoring in first grade. Some students who take the Adaptive Oral Reading test will meet the sentence reading threshold and will be routed to the oral reading of passages. Students can meet the threshold by correctly answering a minimum of 15 sentences (remember the score in the numerator?) and 75% of what they attempt (think denominator!). In other words, 15/30 doesn’t meet the threshold, but 15/20 does. Some students who take the Adaptive Oral Reading test will route down to foundational skills testing if they do not meet the threshold for the sentence reading fluency metric. If the test results show they’re meeting expectations for foundational skills, then you know sentence reading fluency is the key variable for instructional focus that can help them be on their way to reading passages.
You will likely see a lot of yellow (“approaching expectations”) and red (“below expectations”) in sentence reading fluency scores at the beginning of first grade. By clicking at the top of the column of a report, you can sort by high-to-low or low-to-high. This can help you see if there’s a wide spread of development across those students. Scores like 2/30 and 6/40 suggest that students are guessing during the test while scores like 3/4 and 9/10 are more indicative of taking their time and trying very hard. Guessers and those with high accuracy (albeit slow and steady accuracy) can be grouped differently instructionally. This can help you give each student what they need most to strengthen their sentence reading fluency.
What to focus on in spring of grade 1
By the spring of first grade, we want students to be ready to take the Adaptive Oral Reading test. Comparing how well your students are meeting the performance expectation for sentence reading from fall to winter is key. You can use the Term Summary and Term Comparison reports in MAP Reading Fluency to track progress in sentence reading fluency across seasons. You can also see how expectations change over time by referring to our interpretive tables for sentence reading fluency.
Keep in mind that the performance expectation by season is different than the threshold to route up to oral reading. Sometimes the performance expectation is higher or lower than that routing threshold depending on the time of year and grade. But keeping an eye on whether students are meeting those expectations will help set them up to route to oral reading in the spring of first grade. By that time, the performance expectation listed in our interpretive tables is even higher than the routing threshold: accuracy is 90% or greater and the raw score has to be 15 or greater, too. (Remember that the threshold for routing is only 75% accuracy and 15 or greater.)
Second graders not routing to oral reading?
You have choices with MAP Reading Fluency. If you’re a second-grade teacher and have students who, in the fall, aren’t being routed to adaptive oral reading, you can choose to administer the Adaptive Oral Reading Passages Only test to your entire class in the winter, which is our recommendation. You will still have that trusty sentence reading fluency metric to see which students would have met the threshold to route up and which ones would not if you had given them only the Adaptive Oral Reading Test instead.
By looking at scores longitudinally with the Term Comparison report, you can see if students have improved their sentence reading since the last time they were assessed.
Sentence reading fluency: Time will tell
Keeping an eye on improved sentence reading fluency scores and making sure most students are meeting expectations each term—knowing the bar rises over the course of the school year—is vital. If your students are growing in foundational skills but not sentence reading, you’ll likely need to switch your instructional focus to automaticity of reading connected text from word reading alone. The sentence reading fluency metric gem speaks loudly to the ongoing development of reading, from understanding sounds and letter patterns in words to reading phrases to overall automaticity and understanding of sentences and, finally, to passage-level connected text.
