Assessing Fluency Assessment: A Detailed Look at One-Minute Fluency Measures

Abstract

In 2000, the National Reading Panel named fluency one of the five pillars of reading instruction. As a result, schools across America adopted a variety of fluency assessments. More recently, one-minute fluency assessments have taken over as a way to track and progress-monitor students. Unfortunately, the assessments are not always used appropriately or in ways that benefit the students. For example, these one-minute assessments have often been used to predict how well students will score on state-mandated standardized tests. However, these one-minute fluency assessments, while providing valuable information, reveal only one aspect of a student’s level of fluency. A key issue is the different definitions of fluency that educators, researchers, administrators, and policy makers subscribe to. Many people that have adopted a definition of fluency that includes comprehension have rejected one-minute fluency tests, because they don’t test deeper reading skills. Through a literature review of one-minute fluency assessments, their purposes, their use, and the data that surrounds their validity and predictability pertaining to state mandated standardized tests, this article will argue that one-minute fluency tests can be a useful assessment tool if properly used as one part of the overall assessment puzzle.