Design of the Study

The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) study included three key measures — oral reading fluency, word reading, and phonological decoding. They were conceptualized, constructed, and labeled in the following manner:

• Oral reading fluency (passage reading) refers to the ability to read connected text such as paragraphs and passages with appropriate rate, accuracy, and expression, which is an indicator of comprehension.
• Word reading (also known as word recognition) refers to the ability to recognize familiar written words with appropriate speed and accuracy, relying primarily on orthographic memory (memory of how the words are pronounced).
• Phonological decoding refers to the ability to pronounce unfamiliar words based on knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences.

• Four text passages, each consisting of 152 to 162 words, providing a measure of fourth-graders' ability to read words aloud in connected texts.
• Word lists of 24 English words arranged in increasing order of complexity, providing a measure of individual students’ ability to recognize familiar words.
• Pseudoword lists of 18 made-up but pronounceable words (e.g., “wike”), providing a pure measure of students’ ability to decode or produce pronunciations of words they are unfamiliar with.

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Rapid, accurate recognition of word forms is necessary for fluent oral or silent reading for understanding. The word list task isolates word recognition from context and from strategic reading competence.

Pseudoword reading provides a context-free measure of decoding skill; the ability to convert an unfamiliar letter string into a pronunciation. This skill is needed for reading unknown words.

The word and pseudoword lists were a subset of a larger list developed for use in the Fluency Addition to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (FAN). Although these word lists were developed specifically for adults with very low reading skills, they were based on principles derived from clinically-valid measures of children’s acquisition of phonological decoding and word recognition. These word lists were not intended to address the full range of adult abilities, and our own cognitive laboratory studies confirmed that these words were within fourth-graders’ ability.

The four passages used for the 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency study represent the complexity level of the texts that fourth-graders typically read, according to the readability measures we used, such as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measure.

For additional information about the development of the measures, see The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study Click to open pdf. report, appendix A, the “Task Development Framework” section, and appendix B.

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Each student was presented with one of four forms of the Oral Reading Fluency assessment, as displayed in the table below. The text materials presented to students were the same in all forms except that students were presented with one of two equally difficult versions of the word list and pseudoword list. In addition, the reading passages were presented in a different order in each of the four forms to balance out order effects. Note that sentence repeat prompts and oral reading feedback questions were not analyzed for the 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency study.

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NCES has so far conducted two studies of fourth-grade students' oral reading skills, one in 2002 and the more recent one in 2018. While both the 2018 Oral Reading Fluency study and the 2002 Oral Reading study measured similar constructs, the design of each study differed significantly (see the comparison table below). In addition, the data from the 2018 assessment and the 2002 assessment were not calibrated or analyzed together. For these reasons, the results from these two studies should not be directly compared in any way.

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