The Relationship Between Reading Fluency and Lexile Measures

With increasing emphasis being placed on teachers to show an improvement in student achievement, schools are relying on indicators such as reading fluency and reading comprehension to gauge student progress throughout the year. Since the growth on these assessments are used in calculating teachers and administrators’ yearly job evaluations, the significance of these measures has never been higher. Teachers and administrators want to know if the time spent on measures such as reading fluency is worth the sacrifice in the instructional day, when this time could be spent on teaching state mandated standards. The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental correlational study was to examine the relationship of reading fluency, the predictor variable, and reading comprehension, the criterion variable, among third, fourth, and fifth grade students from a rural, Title 1 school district in southwest Georgia. A Pearson product moment correlation was used to answer the following research question: Is there a relationship between a third, fourth, or fifth grade student’s oral reading fluency score, as measured by Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, and their reading comprehension score, as measured by Scholastic Reading Inventory? The results of this study have determined a strong positive correlation exists between reading fluency and reading comprehension in grades three, four, and five. The inclusion of Lexile as the measure for reading comprehension did not diminish the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension. Further research is needed using Lexile as the measure for reading comprehension to broaden the generalization of this study