Does anyone have a resource for appropiate reading speed?

What instrument was used to obtain these results? The test should have norms with it; on this site so to LD in Depth and click on Reading, then scroll down to Reading Fluency…this article says the average reading rate for gr. 3.5 is 135wpm. The Gray Oral Reading Test also has specific norms with it…search on the web, but it depends on the test that your child was given.

We received a program called vision builder through our vision therapist. It times the childs reading speed and tests for comprehension.

Thanks for the info. I thought he might be just a tad slow. I will let everyone know if his speed picks up with this program.

He does not belong in special ed. for reading if this is the case.

LD students are down in the way below 100 wpm range in almost all cases. I get students who read 26, 35, 44 wpm and remediate up to 75-90 wpm in 2-3 years, at grade level. Your son does not have a problem.

The rates presented are well within norms - Ken Campbell

Thank you Anitya and Ken. That is very reassuring coming from such true experts.
You made my day!

I am just curious because reading fluency(rate+accuracy) is a huge problem even after decoding and comprehension are remediated.

It was silent reading. I am sure he reads slower out loud. I think most people do. I know I do.
His accuracy is measured by his ability to answer the questions which could not be answered if there were alot of errors. There are quite a few questions covering everything the essay was about. You also can’t cheat by having alot of knowledge and guessing. The questions are very specific and are phrased asking about what the essay said not just general knowledge.
There is no way you could answer those questions with 100% accuracy without reading accurately.
I know because I will skim over his shoulder and will miss the questions because I wasn’t reading every word.

My son’s fluency has always been assessed with oral reading withthe examiner marking errors; how is silent reading assessed?

I have been only able to assess silent reading with comprehension questions. Some spectacular speeds have been rcorded - even in special ed classrooms. Obtain oral fluency and practive every day, some have the ability to really fly.

After my concussion, my reading speed dropped dramatically, as did my ability to track ahead. Thank goodness that was a short-lived symptom, but it was enough to reinforce my empathy for our dyslexic children.

I have been only able to assess silent reading with comprehension questions. Some spectacular speeds have been rcorded - even in special ed classrooms. Obtain oral fluency and practive every day, some have the ability to really fly.

After my concussion, my reading speed dropped dramatically, as did my ability to track ahead. Thank goodness that was a short-lived symptom, but it was enough to reinforce my empathy for our dyslexic children.

I know many of the “morons” by name. Their very pro-kid research determined that reading speed must approach that of human conversation for there to be comprehension. What’s so reprehensible about that? Letting kids be kids is fine on the playground - oops, but what about bullies? drugs? weapons? Letting kids languish in schools, being made fun of because they cannot read takes a plan, takes research. Undoing the harm of faddist following inept teachers who bring a philosophy to reading that virtually destroyed a generation of our at-risk kids - takes work on the research front.

I can’t believe your post - especially knowing the researchers who over time brought us this data:

Ogden Lindsley, Tom Lovitt, Bill Wolking, Hank Pennypacker, Owen White, Cecil Mercer, Eric Haughton, Pat McGreevy, and more …these are a few of the pioneers who brought us data-based decision-making in instruction.

Well, reading speed needs to support comprehension, for starters. Another issue is that those who read really slowly frequently tend to read less, to choose to read less, etc. We want a child to read with confidence and comprehension. Also, is it so farfetched to aim for enjoyment of reading?

You can conduct research on reading speed and accuracy just like anything else. You assess a large enough, random sample of children at each grade level and run the statistics. This will provide the data to assist in determining what the average range is and what is clearly well below this range.

Well, I do like my students to read at a moderate speed, just because yes, you can get more done that way.

But I am very nervous about pressure for reading speed.

A very large number of students who come to me for tutoring and almost all the students in the “developmental” (read remedial) math classes that I have taught have been pressured to read fast. Trouble is, they run their eyes over the page fast, but it is questionable whether what they do can be called reading. They don’t understand the material, they don’t retain the material, they get the facts all wrong because they are so inaccurate … if reading means getting meaning from print, this is not reading. But it’s fast!
I spend a lot of my time forcing students to slow down and get things right. As I’ve mentioned before, the funny thing about slowing down and getting it right is that afterwards, they speed up faster than they ever were before when they were trying to be fast. This is true in both reading and math.

I debate also this reading speed = comprehension argument. Where is the research justification for this? I have never seen any, just unsupported claims.
I had a student for a while last year who was truly dyslexic and had started off badly and got attitude problems; he battled at reading around 20wpm or less. But his comprehension was *fantastic*. He argued every detail of meaning and comprehension and word choice.

The claims of reading speed are often exaggerated. And the methods taught to speed up reading are often counterproductive; it has been proven that basically most so-called “speed reading” is just skimming; this is a useful skill, but it doen’t address the need to read in depth. I refer people to an excellent and very funny article that measured real reading speeds and debunked “speed-reading”; title “How Fast Are The World’s Best Readers”, I found the reference on ERIC, sometime in the mid or early 1980’s.

One of the points in this article is that good readers have several reading speeds. The *maximum* for a gifted adult is around 800 wpm, for light reading for pleasure. These same adults slowed down to 250wpm or less for challenging professional material.

Now if excellent adult readers do reading-to-learn at 250wpm or less, even dropping down to 100wpm for something totally new — and my own experience parallels this — then it is ridiculous to demand higher speeds for elementary school students!

As a math person, I often calculate what is up when people throw numbers around. In this reading speed debate, I get two contradictory pieces of information.
On the one hand, people insist that kids must read at 100 to 200 wpm. On the other hand, they say that their children are getting two and three hours of reading homework per night. At 100 wpm, that’s 6000 words per hour, or 12000 words in two hours. And that’s the minimum being reported; three hours at 200 wpm would be 36000 words.
Checking a random novel at *high school* reading level (Rex Stout) from my bookshelf, it comes in at about 75000 words total. So that means, if the kids are reading for the amount of time reported at the speeds reported, the *slowest* acceptable ones are reading an entire novel (high-school level) in a five-day school week and the *barely average* ones are reading an entire high-school level novel in two days.
Somehow this doens’t quite correspond with the other things being reported. Elsewhere people are very upset because their high school child has a thirty-nine page chapter to read. Heck, if he’s reading at these reported speeds, he’ll have it done in two hours or less, and considering there are ten to twenty chapters in the book, that’s two weeks to a months’ worth of work.
Something is not quite right here. Either our kids are reading even more than I do — very unlikely — or these reading speeds are very highly exaggerated.

Again, reading at a moderate speed is nice, but 50 wpm will do the work usually assigned in elementary school and 100 wpm is pretty good for elementary. By high school 200 to 250 is good, and by college you hope to be over 250 (although many people still aren’t.)

Victoria,

Thank you for your input. I agree, there is no reason to push him to be a speed reader.

Here is a site that explains the program I am using. I think my son did have alot of regressions that not only slowed him down but impeded comprehension.
When your eyes are regressing over text you lose a bit of what you are trying to read and it is uncomfortable.
Getting rid of those regressions and getting his eyes functioning at an optimal level is worthwhile.

I also think it is helping his processing speed.

For me, it is all about connecting neural pathways to make his ability to learn easier.

http://www.babousa.org/guided%Reading%20Benefits.htm

I tell my students that accurate is more important than fast.

A few years ago we did one minute probes on every child, several times per year. The good readers were 150 or so wpm, many cases, give or take. Most were close to 100 Then there were the LD kiddoes clocking in a 35-45. There was a huge gap between them and the “poor” readers.

We do find that LD children frequently readly slowly and with poor accuracy. I work on both, accuracy first. The do improve, they become more comfortable and more confident.

So, I think we ignored this factor for a number of years, focussing more exclusively on decoding, then comprehension. We still had some LD children reading so slowly they really found upper elementary grade reading assignments intimidating, even when they could read for short time spans with pretty good accuracy.

The fluency approach I uses does seem to improve speed to something more manageable, w/o sacrificing, and often augmenting, comprehension and accuracy.

The students who use Ken’s program over a period of a year or two make good growth, in most cases.

Absolutely. I do a *lot* of this in my tutoring. This is part of the slow-down-to-speed-up-later system — read slowly left to right without jumping ahead and guessing; then you won’t need all those regressions to correct everything you skipped in the first place.

I’m working right now with a Grade 4 student who has improved mightily, but who is still a determined guesser. He’s now at least reading Grade 4-5 materials, up from Grade 2 in October, but he still needs to correct two or three words in every sentence and he just can’t be independent at that rate. I may have to go to the file card with a corner cut out to prevent him jumping — a last-ditch method but he needs something. Either that or writing out every single word he fouls up until he just gets sick of it.

There are the small regressions as above; then there’s the total regression system. One poster mentioned students who “read” through material fast but then could not recall anything to answer questions; then they went back over the material slowly and were able to recall and comprehend. I pointed out that if they simply skipped the first fast “reading” which obviously wasn’t productive of anything, and started in with the slower approach, a lot of time would be saved and the net result would be faster! This is another point of the slow-down-to-speed-up advice. Or in classic form, make haste slowly.

I have exactly the same issue with my math students. They rush in and guess at an answer, or scribble some sort of disconnected mess, and write down something wrong. I point out that no matter how fast it is, it’s still going to get a grade of zero, and what’s the value of a fast mistake? We spend hours learning to slow down and *think* what you’re going to do next, plan, and organize. Then suddenly, poof, they are getting seven questions right instead of ten wrong, and they are passing instead of wandering lost in a swamp.

Again, I do want my students to reach a moderate reading and working speed — and again and again I’ve seen that they do this best if they first learn to do things correctly and without excess stress. Speed comes with mastery and practice.

I would purpose we look at punishers in emergent reading - awaiting attack…