The Nation’s Report Card Fourth-Grade Students Reading ...

U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences NCES 2006?469

The Nation's Report Card

Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading

The National Assessment of Educational Progress

What is The Nation's Report CardTM?

THE NATION'S REPORT CARDTM, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is a nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Since 1969, assessments have been conducted periodically in reading, mathematics, science, writing, history, geography, and other fields. By making objective information on student performance available to policymakers at the national, state, and local levels, NAEP is an integral part of our nation's evaluation of the condition and progress of education. Only information related to academic achievement is collected under this program. NAEP guarantees the privacy of schools, individual students, and their families.

NAEP is a congressionally mandated project of the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. The Commissioner of Education Statistics is responsible, by law, for carrying out the NAEP project through competitive awards to qualified organizations.

In 1988, Congress established the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) to oversee and set policy for NAEP. The Board is responsible for: selecting the subject areas to be assessed; setting appropriate student achievement levels; developing assessment objectives and test specifications; developing a process for the review of the assessment; designing the assessment methodology; developing guidelines for reporting and disseminating NAEP results; developing standards and procedures for interstate, regional, and national comparisons; determining the appropriateness of all assessment items and ensuring the assessment items are free from bias and are secular, neutral, and nonideological; taking actions to improve the form, content, use, and reporting of results of the National Assessment; and planning and executing the initial public release of NAEP reports.

The National Assessment Governing Board

Darvin M. Winick, Chair President Winick & Associates Dickinson, Texas

Sheila M. Ford, Vice Chair Former Principal Horace Mann Elementary

School Washington, D.C.

Francie Alexander Chief Academic Officer,

Scholastic, Inc. Senior Vice President,

Scholastic Education New York, New York

David J. Alukonis Chairman Hudson School Board Hudson, New Hampshire

Amanda P. Avallone Assistant Principal &

Eighth-Grade Teacher Summit Middle School Boulder, Colorado

Honorable Jeb Bush Governor of Florida Tallahassee, Florida

Barbara Byrd-Bennett Chief Executive Officer Cleveland Municipal

School District Cleveland, Ohio

Carl A. Cohn Superintendent San Diego City Schools San Diego, California

Shirley V. Dickson Educational Consultant Laguna Niguel, California

John Q. Easton Executive Director Consortium on Chicago

School Research Chicago, Illinois

Honorable Dwight Evans Member Pennsylvania House of

Representatives Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

David W. Gordon Sacramento County

Superintendent of Schools Sacramento County Office

of Education Sacramento, California

Henry L. Johnson Superintendent of Education State Department of

Education Jackson, Mississippi

Kathi M. King Twelfth-Grade Teacher Messalonskee High School Oakland, Maine

Honorable Keith King Member Colorado House of

Representatives Colorado Springs, Colorado

Kim Kozbial-Hess

Fourth-Grade Teacher Fall-Meyer Elementary

School Toledo, Ohio

Andrew C. Porter

Professor Leadership Policy and

Organizations Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee

Luis A. Ramos

Community Relations Manager

PPL Susquehanna Berwick, Pennsylvania

Mark D. Reckase

Professor Measurement and

Quantitative Methods Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan

John H. Stevens Executive Director Texas Business and

Education Coalition Austin, Texas

Mary Frances Taymans, SND Executive Director National Catholic

Educational Association Washington, D.C.

Oscar A. Troncoso Principal Socorro High School Socorro Independent

School District El Paso, Texas

Honorable Thomas J. Vilsack

Governor of Iowa Des Moines, Iowa

Michael E. Ward

Former State Superintendent of Public Instruction

North Carolina Public Schools

Jackson, Mississippi

Eileen L. Weiser Member, State Board

of Education Michigan Department

of Education Lansing, Michigan

Grover J. Whitehurst (Ex officio) Director Institute of Education

Sciences U.S. Department of

Education Washington, D.C.

Charles E. Smith

Executive Director NAGB Washington, D.C.

The Nation's Report Card CFhouarptht-eGrrad1e Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading

U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences NCES 2006?469

October 2005

Mary C. Daane Jay R. Campbell Wendy S. Grigg Madeline J. Goodman Andreas Oranje Educational Testing Service Arnold Goldstein Project Officer National Center for Education Statistics

U.S. Department of Education Margaret Spellings Secretary

Institute of Education Sciences Grover J. Whitehurst Director

National Center for Education Statistics Mark S. Schneider Commissioner

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations. It fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish reports and specialized analyses of the meaning and significance of such statistics; assist state and local education agencies in improving their statistical systems; and review and report on education activities in foreign countries. NCES activities are designed to address high-priority education data needs; provide consistent, reliable, complete, and accurate indicators of education status and trends; and report timely, useful, and high-quality data to the U.S. Department of Education, the Congress, the states, other education policymakers, practitioners, data users, and the general public. Unless specifically noted, all information contained herein is in the public domain. We strive to make our products available in a variety of formats and in language that is appropriate to a variety of audiences. You, as our customer, are the best judge of our success in communicating information effectively. If you have any comments or suggestions about this or any other NCES product or report, we would like to hear from you. Please direct your comments to

National Center for Education Statistics Institute of Education Sciences U.S. Department of Education 1990 K Street NW Washington, DC 20006?5651

October 2005

The NCES World Wide Web Home Page address is . The NCES World Wide Web Electronic Catalog is .

Suggested Citation Daane, M.C., Campbell, J.R., Grigg, W.S., Goodman, M.J., and Oranje, A. (2005). Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading (NCES 2006-469). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

For ordering information on this report, write to U.S. Department of Education ED Pubs P.O. Box 1398 Jessup, MD 20794?1398

or call toll-free 1-877-4ED-PUBS or order online at http:/.

Content Contact Arnold Goldstein 202?502?7344 Arnold.Goldstein@

The work upon which this publication is based was performed for the National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences,

by Educational Testing Service and Westat.

Executive Summary

The purpose of Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading is to examine aspects of oral reading performance--accuracy, rate, and fluency--that cannot be observed from results of the main NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reading assessment. The results provided here are intended to inform educators and researchers about these three aspects of fourth-graders' oral reading performance and how they relate to their overall reading ability as measured by the 2002 reading assessment.

This study focuses on one relevant, but sometimes overlooked, aspect of reading performance--oral reading ability. Oral reading performance, measured by the components of accuracy, rate, and fluency, constitutes a cluster of critical literacy proficiencies and functions as a significant indicator of overall reading ability.

The present report is a follow-up study to the 1992 study, Listening to Children Read Aloud: Data From NAEP's Integrated Reading Performance Record (IRPR) at Grade 4 (Pinnell et al. 1995). Both were commissioned by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). The 1992 study was NAEP's initial attempt at large-scale measurement of oral reading abilities and one of the first ever performed.

Some of the major findings of the 1992 study include the rating of 55 percent of the participants as fluent, with 13 percent rated fluent at the highest level, based on the same fluency scale used in the present study. Another finding showed a significant relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, as measured by overall reading proficiency on the main NAEP assessment. Furthermore, a majority of the participants (57 percent) were at least 96 percent accurate in their oral reading of the passage used in the study. Moreover, the students' errors seemed related to overall proficiency only when the errors involved a change in the meaning of the oral reading passage. Results for reading rate showed that 61 percent of students read at least 100 words per minute, and, on average, slower readers demonstrated lower reading proficiency. Overall, positive relationships were found among accuracy, rate, and fluency.

NAEP's 2002 data collection on oral reading used much of the same methodology and approach to understanding and reporting oral reading as the 1992 study; however, the results of the two studies are not comparable because different reading passages and administration procedures were used. The students who participated in the 2002 oral reading study also participated in the main NAEP

assessment of reading comprehension; therefore, it is possible to examine the relationship between students' oral reading accuracy, rate, and fluency and their reading comprehension (Dole et al. 1991).

The data in this study were collected from a subsample (1,779) of the sample (140,000) of fourthgraders who participated in the NAEP reading assessment during the early spring of 2002. The data were derived from electronic recordings of the participants reading aloud a 198-word excerpt of "The Box in the Barn," one of the passages the students had encountered one week earlier when they sat for the main NAEP assessment. Only three race/ethnicity groups (White, Black, and Hispanic) were represented in the oral reading study in great enough numbers to report results for these students. Differences in student performance are discussed only if they have been determined by t tests in combination with false discovery rate procedures for multiple comparisons to be significant at the .05 level.

A nonresponse analysis was conducted because school and student response rates did not meet NCES statistical standard 3-2-5 concerning achieving desirable response rates. The rates are currently set at 85 percent for NAEP. When the rates are between 70 and 85 percent, an extensive analysis is conducted that examines, among other factors, the potential for nonresponse bias at both the school and student levels. A nonresponse bias analysis was completed by computing weighted response rates for various school- and student-level characteristics of interest and by conducting chi-square tests. The school nonresponse investigated in these analyses is cumulative nonresponse to both NAEP and the study. The only variables not significant in the oral reading study are type of location at the school level and gender and year of birth at the student level. All other variables show a differential rate of nonresponse between subgroups. The final rates were not adjusted as a result of the nonresponse bias analysis specifically, but were adjusted as a result of nonresponse. More details on nonresponse bias analysis can be found in appendix A.

Major Findings

Oral Reading Accuracy

In the context of this study, accuracy refers to the degree to which a student's oral reading conforms to the letter-sound conventions of printed English (i.e., accuracy measures the child's precision in orally presenting the words in the text). Accuracy is measured as a percentage of words read correctly.

Fourth-Grade Students Reading Aloud: NAEP 2002 Special Study of Oral Reading ? iii

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