This report discusses findings about fourth-grade students' oral reading from a special study that was part of the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. The data were derived from a nationally representative subsample of students who participated in the 2002 main NAEP reading assessment. The results suggest that the three separate components of oral reading ability—accuracy, rate, and fluency—are very much related to each other and to reading comprehension, as measured by the main NAEP assessment. “Fluent” readers in this study were likely to read higher percentages of words accurately, to read the passage at a faster rate, and to have scored higher, on average, on the NAEP reading assessment than “nonfluent” readers. More than one-half of the students read the study passage fluently, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, and at a rate of at least 105 words per minute. However, a group of students whose average scale score and labored oral reading performance suggested they were struggling also demonstrated, on average, the lowest performance on measures of accuracy, rate, and fluency. Students' self-correction of their oral reading errors was found to be somewhat dependent upon whether or not those errors resulted in meaning change. Further, students who self-corrected greater proportions of all errors (meaning-change and non-meaning-change) also showed a higher average scale score. Results for student groups defined by gender and race/ethnicity reflected the outcomes for the entire subsample; i.e., student groups with higher average reading scores were more likely to demonstrate, on average, higher performance in measures of accuracy, rate, and fluency.
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