Assessing reading fluency in Kenya: Oral or silent assessment?

Abstract

In recent years, the Education for All movement has focused more intensely on the quality of education, rather than simply provision. Many recent and current education quality interventions focus on literacy, which is the core skill required for further academic success. Despite this focus on the quality of literacy instruction in developing countries, little rigorous research has been conducted on critical issues of assessment. This analysis, which uses data from the Primary Math and Reading Initiative (PRIMR) in Kenya, aims to begin filling this gap by addressing a key assessment issue -should literacy assessments in Kenya be administered orally or silently? The authors compared second-grade students' scores on oral and silent reading tasks of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) in Kiswahili and English, and found no statistically significant differences in either language. They did, however, find oral reading rates to be more strongly related to reading comprehension scores. Oral assessment has another benefit for programme evaluators -it allows for the collection of data on student errors, and therefore the calculation of words read correctly per minute, as opposed to simply words read per minute. The authors therefore recommend that, in Kenya and in similar contexts, student reading fluency be assessed via oral rather than silent assessment.

Examining oral reading fluency among Grade 5 rural English Second Language (ESL) learners in South Africa? An analysis of NEEDU 2013

“…Notwithstanding the above, ORF studies on ESL students have been conducted in South Korea (Jeon 2012), Kenya (Piper & Zuilkowski 2015) and America (Al Otaiba, Petscher, Williams et al 2009;Jimerson, Hong, Stage & Gerber 2013). This does not include the numerous EGRA studies that have been conducted by RTI and USAID (Abadzi 2011).…”

“…However, other studies by Wiley and Deno (2005) and Pressley, Hildren and Shankland (2005) have reported lower correlations of between 0,4 and 0,5. More recently, Piper and Zuilkowski (2015) found that the correlation between oral reading rate and silent reading comprehension for ESL second-graders in Kenya was 0,37 when the test was conducted in English and 0,33 when it was conducted in Kiswahili. Figures 2 and 3 show the scatter plots and respective histograms of silent reading comprehension and ORF 1 (Figure 2) and ORF 2 (Figure 3).…”

The viability of individual oral assessments for learners: Insights gained from two intervention evaluations

“…This took place in the beginning of the year when most learners are still illiterate. In addition, issues such as assessment sophistication, test anxiety, concentration and attention span require a oneonone oral testing approach (Hobbs & Davidson, 2015;Piper & Zuilkowski, 2015). Therefore, this assessment tool aligns well with the purpose of the impact evaluation studies referred to in this article: To assess the literacy skills developed by South African grade 1 learners.…”

How does gender impact the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension?<p>Akıcı okuma ve okuduğunu anlama arasındaki ilişkilerde cinsiyet nasıl bir rol oynamaktadır?

“…Bu nedenle akıcı okumanın okuduğunu anlama boyutunda sağladığı katkılar önemli görülmektedir. Akıcı okuma ve anlamayla ilgili yapılan araştırmalar da akıcı okumanın okuduğunu anlama ile ilgili önemli bir değişken olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır (Foorman, Koon, Petscher, Mitchell ve Truekenmiller, 2015;Piper ve Zuilkowski, 2015;Paige, Rasinski ve Magpuri-Lavell, 2012).…”

“…Because of this, it is seen important that reading fluency makes significant contributions to the comprehension process. There is an increasing research showing that reading fluency is one of the contributors of reading comprehension (Foorman, Koon, Petscher, Mitchell, & Truekenmiller, 2015;Paige et al, 2012;Piper & Zuilkowski, 2015). Considering Turkish scientific literature in regard to literacy, there are few research exploring the gender's effects on the relations between reading fluency and reading comprehension (Bastug & Keskin, 2012;Kaman, 2012;Kaya & Dogan, 2016).…”