The present study measured the comprehension‐based silent reading efficiency of U.S. students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Students read standardized grade‐level passages while an eye movement recording system was used to measure reading rate, fixations (eye stops) per word, fixation durations, and regressions (right‐to‐left eye movements) per word. Eye movement recordings were regarded as valid only if students demonstrated a comprehension level of at least 70% after reading a passage and answering a series of true/false questions. Reading rates increased over grades, with two exceptions: (a) between grades 6 and 8, growth in reading rate appeared to plateau; and (b) between grades 10 and 12, reading rate increases were seen only among students in the upper two quartiles. Changes in the other three efficiency measures reflected similar patterns of reading efficiency development over grades. The reading efficiency of students in this study was also compared with that of a sample of students from 1960, using norms reported by Taylor (1965) and validated by Carver (1989). Comprehension‐based silent reading rates in grade 2 were comparable across the 50‐year span, but the cross‐grade growth trajectory was much shallower in the present study than it was in 1960. These results suggest that present‐day students may not achieve the same level of word‐reading automaticity as did their 1960 counterparts.

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students’ performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and population considered. In the first study, an assessment of words that can be expected to appear with at least moderate frequency at particular levels of text was administered to students in grades 2 through 12. The second study considered the responses of fourth- and fifth-grade students, including English learners, to words that teachers had identified as challenging for those grade levels. The effects of the same set of word features on students’ vocabulary knowledge were examined in both studies: predicted appearances of a word and its immediate morphological family members, number of letters and syllables, dispersion across content areas, polysemy, part of speech, age of acquisition, and concreteness. The data consisted of the proportion of students who answered an item correctly. In the first study, frequency of a word’s appearance in written English and age of acquisition predicted students’ performances. In the second study, age of acquisition was again critical but so too were word length, number of syllables, and concreteness. Word location (which was confounded by word frequency) also proved to be a predictor of performance. Findings are discussed in relation to how they can inform curriculum, instruction, and research.

The authors’ purpose was to explore the effects of a supplementary, guided, silent reading intervention with 80 struggling third-grade readers who were retained at grade level as a result of poor performance on the reading portion of a criterion referenced state assessment. The students were distributed in 11 elementary schools in a large, urban school district in the state of Florida. A matched, quasi-experimental design was constructed using propensity scores for this study. Students in the guided, silent reading intervention, Reading Plus, evidenced higher, statistically significant mean scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test criterion assessment measure of reading at posttest. The effect size, favoring the guided, silent reading intervention group was large, 1 full standard deviation, when comparing the 2 comparison groups’ mean posttest scores. As such, the results indicate a large advantage for providing struggling third-grade readers guided silent reading fluency practice in a computer-based practice environment. No significant difference was found between the treatment and control group on the Stanford Achievement Test–10 (SAT-10) posttest scores, although posttest scores for the treatment group trended higher than the control. After conducting a power analysis, it was determined that the sample size (n = 80) was too small to provide sufficient statistical power to detect a difference in third-grade students’ SAT-10 scores.

This cross-sectional study examined eye movements during reading across grades in students with differing levels of reading efficiency. Eye-movement recordings were obtained while students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 silently read normed grade-leveled texts with demonstrated comprehension. Recordings from students in each reading rate quartile at each grade level were compared to characterize differences in reading rate, number of fixations, number of regressions, and fixation durations. Comparisons indicated that students in higher reading rate quartiles made fewer fixations and regressions per word, and had shorter fixation durations. These indices of greater efficiency were also characteristic of students in upper as compared to lower grades, with two exceptions: (a) between grades 6 and 8, fixations and regressions increased while reading rates stagnated and fixation durations continued to decline, and (b) beyond grade 6 there was relatively little growth in the reading efficiency of students in the lower two reading rate quartiles. These results suggest that declines in fixation duration across grades may in part reflect broader maturational processes, while higher fixation and regression rates may distinguish students who continue to struggle with word recognition during their high school years.

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