Curriculum-Based Measurement of Oral Reading fluency (CBM-R): An objective orientated evaluation study

The knowledge and practices associated with improved outcomes for readers have yielded converging evidence about practices associated with improved reading outcomes for primary students. This considerable intervention knowledge can be beneficial for English teachers working with struggling secondary readers. Fluency is one critical element that becomes increasingly important for many older students with reading difficulties as they strive to read large quantities of text written at challenging levels, with sufficient speed, accuracy and understanding to keep up with class content and demands. This objective-orientated evaluation study examined the effects of Curriculum-Based Measurement of Oral Reading (CBM-R), a prevention-orientated approach designed to identify readers at risk of not achieving adequate outcomes, on 94 second-grade students from a primary school in New South Wales, Australia. Results indicate that teachers found CBM-R to be a reliable and easily implemented prevention-orientated system, which has the capacity to raise awareness of fluency abilities to guide differentiated practice and reduce the risk of failure in English.