Reading fluency and college readiness

Rasinski, T.V., Chang, S., Edmondson, E., Nageldinger, J., Nigh, J., Remark, L., Kenney, K.S., Walsh-Moorman, E., Yildirim, K., Nichols, W.D., Paige, D.D., & Rupley, W.H. (2017). Reading fluency and college readiness. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 60(4), 453-460.


Fluency in reading is not usually something that secondary school and college teachers think they need to be concerned about. It is assumed that reading fluency has already been “mastered” in the elementary grades. Rasinski et al here present research that challenges those assumptions. They present evidence from a study of 81 college freshmen that suggests that reading fluency continues to be a “critical literacy component” (p. 453) well past grade 8, and that fluency is linked to predictors of college readiness such as ACT scores.

We need to look at reading fluency as a complex and multifaceted set of skills, going beyond just its quantifiable aspects (percentages of words read accurately and words correctly read per minute). Fluent reading is not just fast and accurate reading; it also is reading with flow and expression, and of course, reading with comprehension. All of these components make up fluent reading. If we view fluency as all these things, a case might be made that fluent reading is what defines good reading. All aspects of fluency interact with each other in fascinating ways.

Rasinski and his colleagues had college freshmen read a passage and gathered data on their word recognition accuracy and their reading rate. These data were linked to percentiles and correlated with ACT scores (both on the reading subtest and the overall scores). The goal was to come up with numbers that could serve as “indicators” that could be used to monitor college reading readiness, so that interventions might be provided. Scores on accuracy and automaticity were reported to “correlate significantly and positively with both the ACT reading subtest and composite scores” (p. 457). The researchers concluded that “both word recognition accuracy and automaticity continue to be important factors for reading and academic success into the middle, secondary, and postsecondary grades” and recommended that secondary teachers should “monitor students’ progress in these competencies” (p. 458).

In a helpful sidebar (the “Take Action!” feature on page 459), five suggestions for how to do that are provided. These suggestions are basically the “quick and dirty” data-gathering methods that most elementary teachers and special reading teachers have been using for a long time. These methods don’t tell us everything we need to know about readers; they are quick, quantitative, and only look at limited aspects of reading. These kinds of measures shouldn’t be the only data we use to inform decisions on who gets interventions and what those interventions will be. However, they do provide some practical ways to monitor students’ reading so that students who may be struggling can be initially identified and effective assessment and intervention can be sought. That kind of monitoring is needed at all levels of schooling and is every teacher’s responsibility.