Giving Compass' Take: 

• Cindy Jiban advises that growing stronger reading comprehension skills needs to be a core focus rather than how fast a student can read.  In order to do this, educators must teach reading comprehension by supporting language instruction and decoding skills. 

• Why is comprehension important when trying to enhance early literacy skills? Will edtech tools help with language instruction growth? 

• Read an alternative view, in which educators may want to think about how expanding a student's background will strengthen their ability to understand texts.

When recent NAEP results came out, the bleak headline was that American students are not getting better at reading comprehension. When the NAEP folks convened a panel of reading experts in early April, the primary grades got called out as one potential culprit.

So what needs re-evaluating in K-3 literacy? One reasonable place to look is at oral reading fluency and the foundational skills that feed word decoding.

Building automatic word recognition is important, and fluency measures capture that growth nicely—for a finite period. Moving from 41 wcpm to 71 wcpm means less mental focus spent on sounding out words and potentially more focus on understanding meaning.  But is increasing from 110 wcpm to 140 wcpm equally important? The answer is no. Reading rate matters, until it doesn’t.

What we need is a renewed focus on the point of all that automaticity – reading with comprehension, in more and more complex texts. Reading is not a speedway, but a giant set of highways, main streets, and gravel mountain roads. The point is to go somewhere new.

What can we do to better situate reading comprehension, not fluency, as the goal of reading instruction in the primary grades?

  • Stop timing kids without also following up with checking for comprehension
  • Institute a “fast enough” category: for example, capture all scores above 130 wcpm as simply “above 130.” This way no one gets called the best reader just by being the fastest talker.
  • Adapt the level of text, even if it makes your comparative fluency data messier.Don’t let the “cold reading” concept bleed from assessment into instruction.
  • Reduce the amount of time teachers spend in one on one assessment.But a teacher has to be unresponsive to the whole rest of the class for hours and hours when she is at the back table with a timer, a clipboard, and only one child at a time.

Read the full article about improving reading comprehension by Cindy Jiban at Getting Smart