Survey or industry report
Oral Reading Fluency: Outcomes from 30 Years of Research (Technical Report 1701)
Gerald Tindal, Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon, 2017
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A 50-page technical report that reviews three decades of oral reading fluency research, including how the measure is defined and scored, and how words correct per minute changes across grades. It is published by the University of Oregon's Behavioral Research and Teaching group.
- How much weight it carries
- Written by a university researcher and published as a funded technical report with a copyright notice, not a peer-reviewed journal article. Its norm figures are summaries of several studies that use different passages and tests, so use them as rough anchors, not exact grade benchmarks.
Facts taken from this source
- Oral reading fluency (ORF) was generally defined as the number of words a reader gets right in one minute of reading aloud.
“oral reading fluency (ORF), which was generally defined as the number of words read correctly in one minute” (Introduction)
- In the report's summary of the research, Grade 2 students begin the school year reading about 50 words correct per minute and improve to about 90 by the end of the year.
“Grade 2 students begin the year reading about 50 wcpm and improve to 90 wcpm” (Growth discussion, Grade 2 comparison)
- Words correct per minute (WCPM) is the number of words read in one minute from a sampled passage, minus the words read incorrectly, which include misidentified words, hesitations and omissions.
“was specifically operationalized as the number words read in total (in one minute) from a randomly sampled passage of text minus the number of words read incorrectly (misidentified, hesitated in reading, or omitted)” (Introduction)
- Tindal's 2017 review says grade 4 students begin the fall reading just under 100 words correct per minute and improve to about 120, a gain of less than one word per week.
“Grade 4 students begin in the fall reading just less than 100 wcpm and improve to about 120 wcpm” (Section on median values from Hasbrouck and Tindal, grade by grade summary)