Why assess fluency?

To be able to read, children need to be taught an efficient strategy to decode words.
That strategy is phonics. Phonic decoding skills must be practised until children become
automatic and fluent reading is established.
The simple one-minute assessments can be used to measure the fluency of children in the final stages of Phase 5.

Research identifies the key factors of fluency to be:
• accuracy
• rate/automaticity
• prosody/expression (pauses, intonation).

We have a blog that goes over the importance of fluency in more detail here.