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Abstract
Continued technological advances as well as a renewed interest in the construct of reading fluency have made scientific studies of fluencys component parts more accessible over the past several decades. While it is now generally understood that fluent readers read with appropriate rate, accuracy, and expression (Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, & Meisinger, 2010), very little has been done in changing the assessment of childrens oral reading fluency from a system based on automaticity alone to a system in which all dimensions of fluency are measured. Some tools have been developed to measure fluency as a complex construct, but little psychometric information is available to demonstrate their reliability and validity. The present studies detail the development and the testing of the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale, a new scale grounded in spectrographic measurements of oral reading prosody, which allows users to measure the multiple components of oral reading fluency. Validation of the scale is based on Kanes (1992) argument-based validation framework. The scale was developed and tested with second and third grade children, and interrater reliability was analyzed using reading experts as raters. The relationships between scale ratings and spectrographic measures of oral reading prosody as well as between ratings and traditional measures of reading skill served as evidence of the scales validity. In general, the scale performed well as a tool for providing users with both general and specific information about childrens oral reading fluency.