When students perform at the below basic level on the NAEP: What does it mean and what can educators do?

Introduction

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading (NAEP) results are published biennially, journalists and policymakers focus on the approximately third of a fourth grade cohort who fail to attain the basic standard in reading comprehension. A legitimate concern is that these students do not have the literacy levels required for full participation in the global digital world of the 21st century. However, the attributions and claims of their literacy levels go far beyond this con cern, as illustrated in a segment on the National Public Radio website titled “Why Millions of Kids Can’t Read and What Better Teaching Can Do About It” (Hanford, 2019).

In 1992, the NAEP framework committee (National Assessment Governing Board, 1992) called for periodic stud ies of oral reading fluency (ORF) to establish whether students can recognize the words on the NAEP passages when reading orally. In the latest NAEP ORF study (White et al., 2021), oral reading assessments were administered to a sam ple of students who represented the 36% of fourth graders who performed below basic on silent reading comprehension on the 2017 assessment. The research team divided stu dents who performed below the basic level into three groups: high, medium, and low. Averages for words correct per min ute (WCPM) and accuracy levels for these three groups were as follows: high, 108 WCPM and 94% accuracy; medium, 95 WCPM and 92% accuracy; and low, 71 WCPM and 83% accuracy. These findings led the researchers to conclude that most students scoring below the basic level had prob lems with fluency, word reading, and phonological decoding and could benefit from support in these areas. They also rec ommended investigations into whether elementary schools are teaching accurate and efficient reading skills.
Reports of a strong correlation between ORF and silent reading comprehension (Reschly et al., 2009) have increased the emphasis on ORF in assessment, instruction, interventions, and policies (e.g., No Child Left Behind, 2002). A correlation between two variables like rate of oral reading and silent reading comprehension, however, does not necessarily mean that one is the cause of the other. The profiles of students who do poorly on silent reading comprehension assessments vary considerably (Buly & Valencia, 2002). There are students who read slowly on oral reading tasks but do reasonably well on silent reading tasks, just as there are fast oral readers who do not comprehend well (Trainin et al., 2015). Furthermore, oral reading fluency interventions have shown relevantly lackluster results on silent reading comprehension (O’Keeffe et al., 2012). Additionally, even though oral fluency rates of students in grades one through four, including those in the bottom quartile, increased over the past 15 years (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2017), the percentage of students who score below the basic level on the NAEP silent reading assessment over this period has remained stable (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).

Before policymakers respond to the performances of students on the most recent NAEP/ORF study with mandates for fluency and word-level interventions at middle grades and beyond, available data from ORF assessments merit investigation. In this paper, I examine the performances on oral reading assessments of students who score at or below the 36 percentile to identify their strengths and challenges. I then use patterns from these analyses to address how instruction and interventions can better support students in developing the proficiencies required to perform successfully on silent reading comprehension tasks.

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