VOICE OF LITERACY
ASSESSMENT OF READING FLUENCY USING ACCURACY RATE & PROSODY
DR. PAULA J. SCHWANENFLUGEL
Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Georgia in the Applied Cognition and Development Emphasis Area. She has a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois at Champaign - Urbana.
RESEARCH INTEREST
- Dr. Schwanenflugel was interested in reading fluency.
- Her goal was to research base for the study of reading fluency and reading expression.
- From the research she found out that as students become more expressive when reading it helps them with comprehension.
- Its been claimed that at some point between 3rd and 4th grade reading expression goes underground and becomes implicit prosody. They show eye movement that prosody takes place in their heads as they read.
- Children understand better when reading with expression.
- Expressions helps predict students comprehension.
MORE ON RESEARCH
- They came up with a Spectrographic analysis that takes sound representations and creates a visual representation, which makes it easily to examine what's happening for example pitch, pausing, duration, loudness and measures them.
- It's measured by hertz and decibels. Graph with lines up and down.
- She doesn't recommend teachers to use spectrographs. She says it's better to use the rubric (CORFS) Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale. This rubric identifies typical patterns in prosody in beginner, middle, and advance readers.
- Experts use spectrographs to predict comprehension by knowing words correct per minute.
SUGGESTIONS
To Parents
To Principals
To Policy Makers
- When listening to children read have students read it again giving it the right expression.
- Talk to students about expression.
- Read expressively to children
To Principals
- Evaluate systems and pay attention to those that deal with expression.
To Policy Makers
- CCSS already discuss expression
- Fluency- child is able to read with accuracy, speed, and expression.