FLuent Oral Reading Assessment is a program that automatically assesses students’ oral reading fluency, the most efficient and predictive measure of children’s reading proficiency. It addresses school districts’ and individual teachers’ needs to screen students each school year to identify students that require interventions, and the need to monitor progress in response to interventions.
FLORA is a program BLT developed to measure how accurately, fluently and expressively children read grade level texts. Over three decades of research have demonstrated that children’s oral reading fluency proficiency is an excellent predictor of their reading comprehension and future academic success (1,2). Each school year, millions of children in U.S. elementary schools are tested for oral reading fluency. For example, at Boulder Valley School district, an average first or second grade teacher spends about 6 days of a school year assessing their students’ reading skills. FLORA is designed to help automate this process.
FLORA presents a text passage to a child, records them reading the text aloud for one minute, then computes the number of words that children read correctly. The resulting Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) score can be used to determine if students are at risk for reading, by comparing their scores to norms collected for tens of thousands of first through sixth grade children across the U.S. during fall, winter and spring (3). These normative data are used to determine if children who enter school are below the 50th percentile relative to their peers, and may therefore be at risk for learning to read.
In addition to assessing how accurately and fluently children read, we conducted research to determine how accurately FLORA can assess how expressively children read grade level texts. Children who read texts expressively by pausing at appropriate places and modulating their voice to communicate both meaning and affect—are demonstrating excellent reading skills and comprehension strategies.
Our research, described in the three articles linked in the Publications section on the right sidebar, compared FLORA’s WCPM scores and expressiveness ratings to those produced by human judges. Human judges had excellent agreement on WCPM scores, with average disagreements of 1 to 2 words across all stories; the average disagreement between FLORA and human judges was 3 to 4 words. When FLORA’s ratings of expressive reading, using a 4-point rating scale, from disfluent to highly fluent, was compared to human judges, we learned that FLORA agreed with the human judges more accurately than they agreed with each other. These results indicate that FLORA can be used in real world classroom environments to assess children’s oral reading fluency. MindStars Books (link) use the FLORA system to help children acquire oral reading fluency by providing them feedback on words they may have misread during independent reading of text passages.
Bolaños, D., Cole R. A., Ward, W. H., Tindal, G. A., Hasbrouck, J., and Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2013) Human and Automated Assessment of Oral Reading Fluency Journal of Educational Psychology doi: 10.1037/a0031479
FLORA has two main uses:
Universal Screening— identifying students who are, or may be, at risk of learning to read, Flora lets you assess all students reading proficiency up to five times per year. It displays percentile scores of all students relative to national norms, and displays progress across successive assessments.
Progress Monitoring— Flora provides a flexible and powerful interface for assessing individual students’ reading proficiency whenever you choose, and displaying their progress across successive assessments. You can assign a target you want students to achieve by the end of the school year, and monitor their progress as often as you deem necessary.
