Average isn't Ideal
Reading fluency isn't body temperature
I came late to the following claim, made about a year ago, that reading fluency can be harmful. The researcher, one of my favorites, has since independently revised the argument that was advanced here, which I find very encouraging, because on first glance it struck me as clearly ridiculous.
It is not good to be high, high, high. It’s not good to be low. You say, “Oh good, you got your body temperature down to 64. You’re dead, but you have a nice low body temperature.” In body temperature, average is not just acceptable, it’s perfect. And there’s some others. It’s like blood pressure: average is perfect. We don’t want high, we don’t want super low, we want average: average is perfect… Average is optimal.
And the thing about that is this automaticity thing, this words correct per minute is really sort of a bodily function… So this is one of the cases. Oral reading fluency is where average is not just acceptable, it’s actually perfect. It’s always been fairly clear.
Jan Hasbrouck on “Melissa and Lori Love Literacy,” episode 153, originally published July 2023.1
The central claim here appears to be that after a certain point more fluent readers understand less of what they read, and that there are risks with improving reading fluency beyond average. Some readers, Hasbrouck argued, go too fast for their own good, and comprehension is sacrificed.
This claim that high rates of reading fluency are harmful lacks both evidence and reason and is not a view we should adopt. Hasbrouck deserves heaps of credit for her work, and I credit her specific influence with improving my reading instruction in ways that have helped many kids. So I tried to think carefully about why she might make this assertion.
First, I realized there two things we should be careful not to confuse:
1) Our maximal reading rate differs from our natural rate
We don’t want to teach or encourage kids to read as fast as they can. Hasbrouck made this point as well elsewhere in the interview. Reading at some rate below your maximal fluency is optimal for comprehension. Compared to expending all your mental energy to read 200 words correct per minute, you will understand more if you chill out a bit and read at 160. You don’t want to expend all your cognitive resources just saying the words. You get diminishing returns for your effort. But being at some high percentage of your maximal rate is fairly natural and easy. That’s why elementary teachers can read aloud every day without their classroom becoming a zoo. If their entire working memory was consumed by reading fluently, they’d have nothing left to keep track of who’s in the bathroom and who needs to be separated on the carpet.
But, your comfortable reading rate is tied to your maximal reading rate. Being able to read at 200 wcpm makes it easier for you to read at 160 wcpm than it is for someone whose maximal rate is 160 wcpm to begin with. In other words, your rate for optimal comprehension is below your rate of optimal speed, but it’s still a product of your overall fluency. The more fluent you are, the faster you can read at a pace leisurely enough for full comprehension. While reading too quickly may harm comprehension, I find it difficult to believe there are harmful effects in the mere ability to read quickly. The rate you read something and the rate you can read something are two different things. It’s unlikely that greater reading fluency is harmful. And I’ve seen no evidence, including what Hasbrouck cited in the interview, to suggest that it is.
2) The benefits of fluency are different from the benefits of spending instructional time on fluency
This isn’t necessarily about spending time doing fluency instruction; it’s about existing levels of reading fluency. Just because we may think being in the 90th percentile of fluency is better than the 70th, that doesn’t mean we will find it worthwhile to spend instructional time with the primary, secondary, or even tertiary goal of realizing that improvement.
Hasbrouck was chiefly motivated, I believe, by wanting to help teachers avoid misusing instructional time trying to get good readers to read even faster. There are a lot of misconceptions about fluency out there, and surely she runs into all of them (over and over again). Unfortunately, I worry that the claim advanced here may create more misconceptions, and lead to instructional time being misused, not to get kids to needlessly speed up but rather to get them to needlessly slow down.
The evidence
Hasbrouck is the expert here, and as I said, much of my knowledge of fluency is due to her work in the first place, so I won’t be introducing evidence besides what Hasbrouck cited for her own argument.
Hasbrouck mentioned a study that compared 2018 fourth-grade NAEP performance and oral reading fluency.2 There was a clear correlation between NAEP achievement and reading fluency. The advanced performers, the highest scoring group on the NAEP, also had the highest average ORF rate at around 160 wcpm, which is also the 75th percentile for the spring of fourth grade on Hasbrouck and Tindal’s norms chart. Hasbrouck argued that there appears to be no benefit to being any higher than the 75th percentile since that was good enough to score advanced, and, for apparently other reasons, being much higher than that is actively harmful.
For a few different reasons, I think that’s incorrect.
First and maybe obviously, it’s probable a many of those advanced students did read faster than 160 wcpm, which was the average of the group, not the maximum. This isn’t case closed, however, because Hasbrouck was pretty clear that the 75th percentile was an estimate, and the point of this discussion is certainly not to pin down exactly where on the normal distribution readers start to lose comprehension. It could be, given Hasbrouck’s claim was correct, that all those advanced scoring students have reading rates closely clustered around the 75th percentile, and many of the very most fluent readers are dispersed among lower-performing groups in quantities insufficient to greatly raise those groups’ overall average ORF rates. A priori, I find that unlikely, but, given Hasbrouck’s argument that the most fluent readers do worse is correct, it’s a possible explanation.
Second, there’s a basic problem with our stand-in test of comprehension here: there’s no way to do better than advanced. We might fail to see a correlation for higher achieving students because the test is too easy to differentiate their performance after a certain point. That doesn’t mean there’s no benefit to being highly fluent, it just means there’s little benefit on that particular measure of performance. Give everyone a harder test, and we'll start to see the high-achievers separate again, and the correlation will reappear. If we fail to see a correlation between reading tests and reading fluency at the upper extreme, it may be because our test is not sensitive enough to differences above a certain ability. But those differences may still exist and they may still matter. Our instrument just doesn’t measure them.
Comprehension isn’t the only thing that matters
Even if you forget about the study and the data, remember this fundamental truth: comprehension isn’t the only goal of reading. This is a problem for the argument that high fluency is harmful. Comprehension just is not the only thing that matters. Even if there were no benefits to your present comprehension in being highly fluent, there would still be plenty of positive effects. Time matters. You can read more in less time. This lets you read more in total or read the same amount and have time left over for other activities. Because you can read more, you acquire more vocabulary and content knowledge. You can learn more stuff and enjoy more stories. You have a wider choice of books, which makes reading more enjoyable. This is easy to overlook as adults with an infinite selection. Third-graders, in contrast, have limited choices of topics and books to read. But third-graders reading at a fifth-grade level have considerably more. Reading is more fun when you’re better at it, and you’re more likely to do something that’s fun.
For developing readers, fluency is a positive feedback loop: fluent readers get more exposures to more words and so more rapidly expand their sight word lexicon, which makes them even more fluent. Furthermore, fairly quickly after a kid learns to read, reading becomes an important source of vocabulary and language development. Even highly socialized adults mispronounce words all the time because they’ve only ever seen them in print.
Finally, there’s a less obvious issue brought up by this whole notion of fluency and comprehension correlating. First, the reason why they correlate is not random: fluency is one of the prerequisites for comprehension. There are others, including knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, text structure, and content. The developments of all these other prerequisites also depend, in part, on fluency. They also depend on your history as a fluent reader. Do you have years of breezing through books acquiring knowledge, vocabulary, and language? Is your current reading rate more recently achieved through some good evidence-based instruction or are things just finally clicking? Your current ORF score doesn’t say anything about your history of reading ability. Because these other prerequisites of comprehension depend on your historical reading abilities, a present fluency score will never tell the whole story of comprehension, even if it can get us pretty close.
Rather than reject highly fluent reading as harmful, we should accept and celebrate it. First, as described, there are myriad benefits besides a kid’s present comprehension. This includes, significantly, their future comprehension. Their ability to read harder texts in later years depends greatly on how much and how well they can read today. Hasbrouck rightly warns that comprehension quickly starts to drop off for readers below the 50th percentile in fluency. As I have argued before, one of the best ways to inoculate kids against that is to make sure they’re well above the average benchmark, not hovering right at it. This isn’t to produce mindless speed readers, as they often get caricatured. Rather, recall that a comfortable, leisurely rate is bound to your overall ability, and you can’t increase one without the other.
Anecdotes
Hasbrouck cited her years as a reading specialist working with very fast readers who didn’t seem to understand anything. I don’t really trust anecdotal evidence, but her reliance on it makes me feel emboldened to share my own.
First, among last year’s third graders, the class median (50th percentile) was above the 75th percentile nationally. The class’s 25th percentile was above the 50th percentile nationally, and the class’s 75th percentile was above the 90th percentile nationally. We all benefitted from the high fluency. We got so much done and learned so much. There were definite benefits, and we all felt them every day. These third-graders were some of those who ended the year above the 90th percentile in their reading fluency:
A boy with seemingly infinite background knowledge (to the occasional annoyance of his parents, classmates, and teachers), who often broke into full laughter while reading independently.
A former English-language learner who, in as many months, read the first four Harry Potter books, mostly out of class, and who wrote a paragraph describing Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiment during a science unit on the life cycle of plants.
A trilingual former English-language learner, who, given the freedom to choose her topic, researched and wrote an informational book about the Black Death in 14th century Europe.
Finally, a nine-year-old, the youngest of three sisters, who wrote, to support an argument about John F. Kennedy symbolizing the power of reliance on family, that “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, many generals and advisors were telling JFK to resolve the problem by bombing and attacking Cuba. But his brother Bobby told him not to, and instead, JFK sent his brother to reach an agreement with the Soviet Ambassador to remove the missiles.”
We should not cast our strongest readers as Harrison Bergeron, even if his story (for multiple obvious reasons) they’re more likely to enjoy reading than anyone else in their class. I offer their examples not to take credit for their abilities or achievements (none of which I deserve), but only to say we have no right to disparage very fast readers with neither evidence nor reason behind us. And, imagining how these kids would react had I insisted they slow down, I would caution us that we do so at our peril.
Melissa and Lori Love Literacy (2023, July 7) Fluency Instruction and Assessment with Jan Hasbrouck. https://literacypodcast.com/podcast?podcast=Buzzsprout-15157927.
White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., and Li, M. (2021). The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study (NCES 2021-025). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2021025.