Fewer than half of students demonstrated proficiency on Michigan state-administered summative assessments at the end of third grade at a rural, Title I school in Michigan. The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare reading fluency gains between grade levels (i.e., kindergarten, first, and second grades) in an effort to better understand…

Although phonemic awareness is a known predictor of early decoding and word recognition, less is known about relationships between phonemic awareness and text reading fluency. This longitudinal study is the first to investigate this relationship by measuring eye movements during picture matching tasks and during silent sentence reading. Time spent…

Many schools are adopting a Response to Intervention (RTI) model to support and evaluate learning (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006). Universal screening and progress monitoring are two essential components of RTI that generally support improved student outcomes (Shinn, 2007). In many schools, teachers collect and use a tool called oral reading fluency for…

This 2-year longitudinal study examined initial evidence of progress in reading for 1,512 children with and without identified speech-language and/or learning disabilities (LD-SLD) in the context of the explicit literacy instruction provided in Michigan's Reading First (RF)schools. The findings suggested that children with LD-SLD labels…

This study focused on the predictive validity of fluency measures that comprise Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). Data were gathered from first through third graders attending 44 schools in 9 districts or local educational agencies that made up the first Reading First cohort in Michigan. Students were administered DIBELS…